mice as food??

[Mark Shingleton]

hi guys, not bin on here for a while. just been looking at a care sheet for t.blondi and it said can feed pinkie mice ( pre-killed ). i seen alot of videos on youtube of mice been eaten, some were a.geniculata. i have an adult geniculata but did not want to feed mice incase legs kicking injure the spider and i kinda like mice, but can they eat pre killed? i thought they just ate live. i got a snake so got plenty of frozen rodents... i think i just read somewhere about eating mice can cause problems wi moulting. what do you guys think?
thanx
mark

[Jens Falk]

Those youtube clips are just crap, mice contains wrong nutrients and wrong proteins and fats.

[Martin Farladansky]

"Can they eat mice?" Yes, they can.
"Do they NEED to eat mice?" No, they don't.

You can give a pre-killed mouse to a tarantula, and she will probably eat it (although they sometimes make a mess and afterwards it smells like rotten), but why would you do that knowing that with insects is enough?
Although I also heard that feeding vertebrates to Ts may cause molting problems, we know that in the wild they sometimes catch rodents, birds, lizards, etc. I don't think that it will cause problems if you feed a mouse once in a blue moon.
Personally, I prefer to use only crickets, roaches and worms.

[Colin D Wilson]

The fact that feeding live would be unethical is the first point (and sensible discussions on this controversial topic please if it carries on!! ta muchly)

There's a lot of hype on the tinterweb about feeding the odd mouse etc to tarantulas, some say it's ok and give reasons why, others can give reasons as to why they're not a good food item.

All i'll say is that spiders will do very well on a diet of inverts, yes there possibly has been times in the wild where a spider has eaten a mouse (or similar) but this i would presume is down to the spider being opportunistic. From a limited research i've done there seems no reason to give a spider a food item that contains proteins and fat content that would be technically "harder" to digest. They inevitably just take the "requirements" they need and expell the rest, so realistically it'd be wasting the majority of the nutritional components from the mouse.

[Mark Shingleton]

thanx guys... illl stick with crickets and locusts and keep the mice for young mitchel, hes a greedy little snake anyway and dont think he'd apriciate sharing his food.
thanx

[Christian Elowsky]

I have no doubts that overfeeding/power feeding kills more tarantulas than anything else. It comes down to growth rates and how fast the "machinery" of molting can keep up. The process involves breaking down the old exoskeleton, making the new, and getting it all done on a time table. All of that molecular work takes enzymes, metals, and more than just sheer fat and calories. When people feed lizards and mammals, except possibly to prep for a huge breeding attempt in the females, they end up pushing the works too hard. I've been seeing many animals, mostly Theraphosa spp., which are getting "ulcers" which I suspect are from weak exoskeletons. Besides the ethical discussions, which are much stronger across the puddle on the BTS side than here, there is no reason to feed a tarantula the caloric equivalent of an entire bucket of lard.

Do any job twice as fast, and you'll see more mistakes. If people choose to push the machinery in these animals, you will see the same, and that's reason enough to do it. Sadly, in the US, the average hobbyist lasts around 3 years, and they want "results". Idiots, the lot. By the way, 90% of the time, those ulcers are lethal.

Having said all of that, I have fed "left over" pink mice to tarantulas, very rarely (less than 12 times in 15 years), and only because I knew where the animals were in the molt cycle, and they had fasted for over a couple of months. At the time, I had some small snakes which would refuse food, now that I no longer have snakes, I no longer even contemplate rodents (please save the arguments about feeding live vs frozen to reptiles, it was years ago).

Ethics aside, there is no reason to do it, and lots not to.

[Colin D Wilson]

Thanks Christian, I was kinda hoping you or another US member would reply to this as "husbandry techniques" do vary.

Constuctive input as usual .....Thanks .

[Stanley A. Schultz]

Those youtube clips are just crap, mice contains wrong nutrients and wrong proteins and fats.

JENS: NOT PICKING ON YOU ESPECIALLY. I'M PICKING ON THE INTERNET/ARACHNID ENTHUSIAST CULT FOR PERPETUATING MYTHS AND DRIVEL. NO PERSONAL OFFENSE INTENDED!

While I heartily agree with you about the efficacy of YouTube, I have to disagree with you on the nutrition issue. I see this or similar statements over and over again on the Internet's arachnid forums, but here are the real facts:

1) There is no real data, just poorly thought up anecdotal blather, on the nutritional requirements of tarantulas, and no real data on how spiders' metabolisms deal with "variant" proteins, fats, carbohydrates, etc.

2) Wild tarantulas often eat vertebrate prey, and in fact, some species (e.g., Theraphosa blondi the goliath birdeater tarantula - reported by both Dr. S. Marshall and Rick C. West) may subsist almost wholly on frogs and toads in the wild.

3) Too many enthusiasts have been feeding their tarantulas vertebrate prey for decades with little or no trouble or reason to suspect a problem.

While some enthusiasts have claimed that their "Tarantella horribilis" had trouble molting "peeing," climbing glass, or getting a curl to set in their coiffure, no one has yet presented any logical connection between vertebrate prey and any other malady. And when you begin asking the tough questions, either these statements are based on "What I read on the 'Net from someone else" who was equally uninformed, or ultimately by an enthusiast who fed one tarantula one or two mice, and the single tarantula had trouble molting 9 months later; and the enthusiast jumped (through some leap of intellectual fantasy) to the conclusion that the two were connected, probably in a desperate attempt to explain the unexplainable or absolve themselves of guilt.

Sorry. "There ain't enough meat in that hamburger. I ain't buying it!"

[Colin D Wilson]

I can see what you're saying Stan, and i agree that two events (originally unrelated) are often brought together to substanciate a particular theory (however tentative).

One point i will make is that amphibians and mammals have totally different component proportions regarding fats, proteins and mineral solids. If you take a blend of invert body solution and one of amphibian they are very close in the percentage of differing components, that of mammals is extremely different. Therefore using this info amphibian prey items for the larger theraphosids would be comparative to bulk invertabrate intake, thus confirming Messrs Marshall and Wests reports.

[Christian Elowsky]

Darrin and I did some work a few years ago comparing the zinc and calcium concentrations found in the fangs Theraphosa and Acanthoscurria. He sent samples of exuvia of animals which had lost fangs after molting and those which did not. With EDX (energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy) I did find different levels of various metals in the groups. The only difference? Vertebrate diet. Sadly, the sample size was far too small for me to even write up for the ATS Magazine. In my original post, I did not even mention the "idea" that the issues were related to metals/mineral differences. I more point to the lack of time to sequester the required materials before a molt occurs. My tiny look seemed to point at calcium being a real problem, but again, I'm not stating it was a nice set of data.

At Arachnocon in 2007, a well rounded round table discussion all agreed that overfeeding was the main issue facing the hobby, the group included Eric Reynolds, Bill Korinek, Michael Jacobi and I think Frank Somma. Since then, I have been making my own observations, and I've seen enough to support that overfeeding (of any prey items) or commonly feeding rodents causes molting issues.

Have I done controlled experiments? No.

What I would really like is for hobbyists to do what I have done. Find tarantula threads/posts where there is a molting problem (wet molts, ulcers, fang/leg loss) and ask the original poster what sort of diet they've been feeding. The trick is to be SURE that there was no trauma associated with the problems. Also, and this would be more difficult, life span information would be great too. Mammals as food, in my opinion, constitutes overfeeding, overfeeding promotes too rapid growth. Also overfeeding in many animals systems has been shown to drastically reduce life spans. Running mitochondria at full blast will ROS 'em to death, not to mention greater translational errors. Do tarantulas get cancer? Nope. Do overfed animals die much younger? They do in other systems, but I'm not about to condone "experimenting" on tarantulas.

Lastly, we're not talking about wild animals here. I have no doubt that a T. blondi will eat any and everything it can, but I also have no doubt that they spend more time burrowing, hunting, avoiding predators and fasting than our cushy, couch potato pets.

I will say that the discussion greatly depends on species and culture (temps, humidity...). I really hope more people will watch and ask, and make their own observations. Stan and I are just two opinions in this broad hobby.

[Mrs Linda Street]

In our experience, and Theraphosa's do feature prominently in our collection, there is no reason to give mice, in fact, we've found in the past that it does tend to 'blow them up'. Over the last 2 years, we've fed them exclusively on Dubia Roaches, they love them, the adult female Dubia's are a nice size, good food value, and very easy to breed, plus they don't smell like crickets !! and it doesn't take long to have a self sustaining colony, and most of our other T's readily take small or medium Dubias

[Neill House]

Have to agree with Linda.. the dubias are the way forward imo, and bean weevils for slings.

[Jens Falk]

Only B. dubia is not enough, they need just like you and me bigger variation when it comes to food, so they should also be fed locusts and crickets ect ect and not just roaches.

[Mrs Linda Street]

I personally would'nt touch locusts, I've lost 2 nice T's feeding locusts sometime back, they carry too much bacteria, even after gut cleaning at high temperature, they are still risky imo. Well fed roaches on a varied diet is more than sufficient for keeping T's healthy throughout their life.

[Neill House]

Well, mine get a variety, with worms of all sorts, crickets and bluebottles all in the mix.. but Dubias are brilliant imo