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Message: <blockquote data-quote="octanejunkie" data-source="post: 191897" data-attributes="member: 3872">Nice project, albeit a bit ambitious for your first foray into T keeping, if you are not in a hurry you, and your spiders, may fare well.Research bioactive enclosures and get that setup and running first. Pick a custodian species, like springtails or isopods, and watch that colony establish. Learn to be successful here first as this will be the basis for your enclosure, literally.In the meantime, get started with a few Ts. I would recommend a new world terrestrial and an arboreal so you can acclimate yourself with the differences in both housing and husbandry for each. P metallica is a popular and colorful one, P. regalis will be cheaper to begin with.If you do decide to bring in a whoard of arboreals, know that you can house them separately until you are ready to go communal, and when you do, introduce all individuals to the group enclosure at the same time. Everyone is new, no one has established "their dirt" yet, so to speak.There is much info out there about communal setups, many warnings from folks that have never tried, and lots of info about failed ones. The key seems to be hotboxing them, meaning overpopulating the enclosure so they are in constant contact with each other. Some say they will tolerate each other, some say otherwise. There are no "naturally occurring" poecilotheria communities that have been documented found in the wild I have read about.Some say eventually all communals fail, some say that attrition is inevitable, others have experienced one fat spider at the end of the exercise. Whether natural selection, or otherwise, the consensus is to overfeed communal setups, or at least feed often to ensure all individuals get to eat; and always offer more than one food item per individual animal. Some individuals are greedy and will grab more than one food item. This is natural T behavior, even when kept individually.I stagger feeding my Monocentropus balfouri communal setups, meaning I feed batches of feeders two days in a row in hopes that the Ts that are full from the first day don't go after the food items again on day 2, allowing the ones that didn't eat on day one get second chance.Anyhow, do your research, start your projects (enclosure and custodians), and T keeping in general, and start threads to document and track your progress/ask questions.Looking forward to seeing your results!</blockquote>

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