Saving food for later.

[Andrew Ferguson]

The general rule I have read is that any food not eaten within 24 hours should be removed. Ok, I'm fine with this. However, is this for the general well being of the spider or just good housekeeping? Or will a tarantula kill its prey, wrap it in a silk cocoon and save it for later, in the same way a lot of true spiders do? I cannot seem to find anything in the text books I have to say they do. But then again, those same books don't say they don't. So has anyone observed this type of behaviour?

[James Box]

i'd say it's both housekeeping AND the spider's safety....but just as a disclaimer, i often don't remove strictly after 24 hours. sometimes i've found spiders eat the prey a few days later, probably cause they just couldn't be bothered til i tried nudging the prey towards them.
also, with colonies of scorpions, i've often just dumped a few prey items in and let the scorpions polish them off in their own time.

however, there's alot of good reason for removing prey items after a day or so if not eaten:

prey items can sometimes attack, and i've lost an insectivore snake (rough green) to a cricket in the past before, had a great big hole bitten out of its neck. also heard of a lazy person asked to care for someone else's lizard dumping all the crickets in at once. the owner returned from holiday to a skeleton and alot of fat crickets.
little horrors!

also if a spider doesn't eat the prey, it can mean that it's coming up to a moult, and of course it's even more vulnerable then.

as for housekeeping (and i'm a bad housekeeper for myself, trying not to be with the pets), cleaning out uneatens and deads means less chance for mites, mould and phorid flies to develop.

[Kate Arbon]

Also, if you want to give your spider the best quality food possible, it's better if they eat something fresh out the cricket tank (assuming you bother to feed and water the crickets, sometimes I get lazy). Otherwise the cricket may be dehydrated or starving when the spider eats it, and while I doubt that's actually bad for it, it's not as nutritious as a juicy fresh one

[Andrew Ferguson]

My crickets are well fed on fresh fruit and veg remnants. Some of the crickets will have grown to a size that I think maybe too big for Smiffy very soon.