Wild prey items?

[Ian Hall]

Does anyone catch their own prey items from their garden and other places?

Examples....

Grasshopper
Cricket
Woodlouce
Any kind of true flies?
etc...

Cheers

Ian

[Andy Wood]

Have done in the past, crickets, moths and craneflies also greenflies for tiny
spiderlings and mantislings..
One thing I would avoid is Woodlice I was feeding them to a tree frog that
arrived at the local greengrocers in bananas ,did a bit of research on them as
a food item and found they accumulate high levels of heavy metals, cadmium ,
lead, mercury etc from their diet. Don't actually know if the levels would be
harmful to T's, need to research it a bit more...

AndyZoo

[Ian Hall]

Cool thanks for that Andy, hope we can get more feed back about this woodlouce issue.

[Colin D Wilson]

Quick answer is no, because you cannot be absolutely sure the prey items haven't been in contact with any pesticides etc.

Woodlice are perfectly ok in with the spider as enclosure cleaners, what i would do is quaranteen the woodlice for over two weeks and feed them fresh veggies and fish food flakes so they can expell any chemicals they have consumed, being Crustacea (crabs etc) they will need a certain area of the enclosure to be slightly damp as they use the same breathing apparatus (ie gills situated along the underside of their body) I've not had a tarantula or spider show apparent illness through taking one as prey in the time i have used them

[Roger Dixon]

I collect wild grasshoppers, crickets and occasionally mice! I am fortunate to live in a pesticide free country area and find that wild food appears to be better than farmed stuff. I feed the same food to frogs as wel as arachnids.

[Colin D Wilson]

Hi Roger, welcome to the forum.

You're lucky to have such an area thats free from chemicles, over here we have hardly any areas completely free which is a real shame as we could reduce our food costs by quite a large amount if it were so.

Thanks for joining

Colin

*Note to readers....Roger lives in South Africa so we dont need to engage in the ethics again on feeding mice etc ....simply......different countries-different opinions*