How to Care for Tarantulas!

If you're thinking about getting a pet tarantula, but you're not sure what species to go with for a beginner, look no further than the curly hair tarantula. Today we are going to teach you all about them and how to take care of one. The curly hair tarantula or Brachypelma albopilosum or Brachypelma albopilosum is a very docile species in general that tolerates handling very well. And regarding the species name, there are a couple of different pronunciations of it with Brachypelma versus Brachypelma for the genus. But as I was taught in college, as long as you can spell it correctly, that's the most important thing. It's okay if you pronounce their scientific name slightly differently than somebody else does. But in the tarantula keeping hobby, most keepers do refer to their animals or their tarantulas by their scientific name rather than their common name. So first it is important to learn the scientific name of the species you want to keep. And while we're on the subject, if you are writing out a scientific name for any animal, the first letter of the genus should be capitalized, but the first letter of the species should be lowercase. A lot of people will capitalize both parts, but that's incorrect. The species should be all lowercase. Anyway, scientific names aside, Brachypelma albopilosum or curly hair tarantula is a fantastic starter tarantula. They, like I said, are easy to handle and most new world species of tarantulas are generally furrier or hairier. They are more docile and calmer, so therefore easier to handle. And their defense mechanism is to take their back legs and they kick these urticating or irritating hairs off of their abdomen. Old world tarantulas on the other hand are generally less hairy. They're more skittish and their defense mechanism isn't to kick urticating hairs at you, but rather to cause a pretty painful bite. So for the most part, not that you have to do a curly hair tarantula as your first one, but if you want a very handleable species, a curly hair or a lot of new world tarantulas are going to be your best bet. In general, females will live a lot longer than males. For curly hairs, the males live around four years, whereas females can live eight to 10 years. So depending on the sex of your tarantula, you might have a pretty long lived pet. Today I'm going to be covering how to properly house or build an enclosure for a curly hair tarantula, how to feed them, how to maintain them, and how to handle them. A lot of this information will apply to other species of tarantulas too, but it will be tailored specifically for the curly hair tarantula today. Let's start with setting up their enclosure. A 10 gallon tank or an equivalent sized plastic tub works great for an adult curly hair tarantula. Obviously small spiderlings or slings for short can live in smaller environments. A lot of keepers will put slings in honestly pill containers like this or even slightly smaller for very young specimens. And as they age, they get upgraded into larger deli cups for a full adult. Like this curly hair here, it's recommended to keep one in around a 10 gallon tank. If you want to go all out though and build them a mansion of an enclosure, like what we're going to show you in today's video for our curly hair grace here, we're going to use a 32 quart tub. You can do a glass tank if you want, or if you go with a plastic tote, the color of the plastic doesn't really matter. However, for best viewing capabilities, I recommend choosing a clear plastic tote. Obviously, like with any animal, you'll want to drill holes in that tub for ventilation and curly hair is like a lot of ventilation. They don't want air to become stagnant. So I recommend drilling quite a few holes along each side of the bin. However, the holes shouldn't be at the bottom of the bin because that's where your substrate layer is going to be. Instead, I recommend drilling those holes near the top or in the middle of the walls. If you're going to use the glass tank route, then instead of using a screen lid, which if a tarantula climbs up and underneath, they might get their claws caught in the screen. I recommend kind of retrofitting a plastic lid on top. The last thing to consider about the enclosure itself is the orientation or overall shape of their enclosure for arboreal species of tarantulas. Since they live in trees in the wild, it's best to have more of a vertically oriented enclosure. Whereas for more of a terrestrial or ground dwelling species like the curly hair, you'll instead want a more horizontally oriented enclosure so that they can utilize all of that space. If you put a terrestrial species in a vertical enclosure, you're going to have a lot of wasted space there because they're not really going to climb around much. Okay? Now that you have your enclosure picked out and holes or ventilation provided, the first thing you'll want to add to it is the substrate. The type of substrate you want to use varies based on what species of tarantula you want to keep. But for most species, you can just use a tropical soil and you'll want a lot of it like three to four inches, especially for burrowing species like curly hairs, because they will dig down inside of it. However, you don't want a very wet substrate. For our enclosure, we used a block of eco earth and we mixed it with water. But then since it was pretty saturated and wet, we didn't want to use that really moist bedding for our tarantula. So instead we spread it out in a large bin and let it air dry for a day before using it. And by the way, I will put links to all of the supplies that we recommend in today's video in the description below. After you have your thick three to four inch substrate layer, it's time to add decor, which is my personal favorite thing about setting up a tarantula enclosure. You'll want to provide several large yet sturdy horizontally oriented climbing structures for your tarantula to climb on and explore as well as to hide underneath. We like to use cork bark because it's readily available. It's lightweight yet it's still pretty sturdy and you can angle it in pretty much whatever direction you want. So if you have a terrestrial species of tarantula like this curly hair here, you can keep it more horizontally oriented. Whereas if you have an arboreal or tree dwelling species, you can put cork bark more vertically oriented. You can also fill in the enclosure with fake leaves, especially bigger ones that are going to be sturdier and more likely to hold the weight of the tarantula climbing on them. Or you could use even like skull decor and if you want to and have access to them, a lot of tarantula keepers use real skulls that have been cleaned and sanitized in their tarantula enclosures. It adds a really cool effect to their environment. In our tarantula Grace's enclosure though, we're going to use a fake buffalo skull that was sent to us actually by one of our fans. After decking out their enclosure with several things to climb on, you might want to add a hide as well. We like to use just a coconut hide because our tarantula here loves it. She loves to kind of squeeze herself into it and she feels secure. So you can kind of try out a variety of different decor items to see what yours prefers. And finally the last thing you'll want to add is just a plain old water dish with the chlorinated water. You do not want to use a sponge in the water dish. It turns out the sponge, although it can absorb water and slowly release it over time, it builds a lot of bacteria and that can actually end up killing your tarantula. They can drink from open water in a plain old water dish just fine. And many people actually even claim that they cannot drink from a sponge anyway. So just a, you can use like a cap from a peanut butter jar or for slings or young tarantulas, spiderlings, you can use a bottle cap instead. It doesn't have to be anything too fancy. Next let's talk about temperature, lighting and humidity. The good thing is that they don't need any special temperature or lighting. You can leave your tarantula at room temperature, assuming that yours is around 70 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit. And that is the perfect range for most tarantula species. As far as lighting goes, they don't need any special lighting like UVB lighting, like a lot of reptiles do. Just keep them in a room where they can still get a regular day and night light cycle, like somewhere near a window, not in front of a window, obviously because the sun may overheat their enclosures, but they do need to experience light during the day and darkness at night. For humidity, you do need to provide some humidity to your tarantula, but it's not an exact science. There is however, a little bit of controversy on the best way to provide humidity for your tarantula and exactly what percentage of humidity they need. Some keepers will just simply overflow the water dish a little bit to drain some water into the substrate. When they refill their water, other keepers prefer to just slightly mist one corner of the enclosure. And when that dries up, they missed another corner of the enclosure working their way all around. That way your tarantula can move itself to more of a humid area in its enclosure to rehydrate if needed. And you can simply watch the behavior of your animal. And if they're always in that humid corner, maybe you can expand how big that humidity corner is. The next time you miss the enclosure. However, if they're on the dry end of the enclosure all the time, then your humid side might be a little too humid. So just like a lot of things with animal care, just watch the behavior of your individual specimen at home and adjust as needed. The best thing I can recommend if you're still unsure of how much humidity to provide for your tarantula is to look up where your species lives and check out the local weather throughout the year. It's easy to do a quick Google search to figure out where they live, what the humidity is like in the wild, and therefore what they would probably be most comfortable in, in captivity. Unlike a lot of invertebrates that need overall high humidity when they're about to molt in order to molt successfully, tarantulas use their internal moisture to molt. Therefore the overall enclosure humidity level isn't quite as important as their internal humidity or hydration level. Okay. That covers most of the basics when it comes to housing tarantulas. So next we're going to move on to diet. Tarantulas can luckily be fed just an insect only diet. They don't need any special supplements like a lot of reptiles do. However, there again is some controversy regarding what types of insects you should be feeding your tarantula. For the most part, crickets are actually not recommended and this is primarily because crickets are bred in mass numbers where they are often exposed to dead crickets and they are known to cannibalize each other and that can cause bacteria buildup in the cricket, which then gets transferred to the tarantula and can potentially kill your tarantula. So it's safest to just avoid crickets and instead you can feed Dubia rotas or super worms or mealworms or even hornworms. So if you decide to do the cricket route, which in general is not recommended, but if that's your only option, make sure you get them from a very clean source so that they aren't exposed to other dead crickets and therefore they're eating dead crickets and causing a bacterial buildup. And when you take them home, feed them for a couple of days on nice fresh vegetables to kind of clear them out and make sure that they are healthy crickets that you're feeding to your tarantula. But again, I'd recommend just playing it safe and feeding Dubia rotas, super worms, mealworms and hornworms instead. Primarily Dubia rotas and super worms. The size of the insect you want to feed your tarantula should be no bigger than the size of their abdomen. If it's a pretty small meal, like in a perfect world, each meal for your tarantula should be around the size of their abdomen or a little bit smaller. But if it's significantly smaller, then you might need to feed multiple insect items in order to fill them up. When you're feeding your tarantula, it's best not to leave them in their prey item unsupervised. Instead to A ensure that they are eating and B ensure that the prey item isn't actually biting your tarantula instead. It's best just to tong feed. I recommend using snake feeding tongs actually. They're about 10 to 12 inches long and they make feeding your tarantula easy. Just grab the prey item, wiggle it in front of your tarantula just ever so slightly to catch their attention. And if they're hungry, they will pretty much instantly grab it. If they're not hungry, then they'll generally either run away or they'll kind of fake pounce at the prey item to scare it away, but they don't actually grab it. You'll be able to tell pretty quickly if your tarantula is going to eat or not. If it isn't going to eat, that's fine. A lot of tarantulas as adults go many weeks, even months without food. Oftentimes when a tarantula doesn't want to eat or it refuses its meal, it's probably getting ready to molt its exoskeleton soon. So just keep an eye on it. And when it does molt, wait about four or five days for the new exoskeleton and its fangs to harden up. And then you can offer food again. And yes, they do shed their fangs when they molt. So if your tarantula stops eating for a few weeks, it's totally normal, especially if they're about to molt. However, if their abdomen starts shrinking in size, that's concerning. Try offering different food items to see if they prefer something else or review their habitat to make sure everything is set up correctly. A stressed out tarantula usually won't eat. As far as frequency of meals goes, generally slings should be fed once every three to five days, preferably just an appropriately sized single prey item. Adults should be fed once every week to every two weeks, depending on their size and their age. Finally, let's talk about handling your pet tarantula. For the most part, they're actually kind of hands off pets. They make better display animals than handleable pets. And that's because handling them simply can stress them out if you do it too much or at all for some individuals. But for those specimens that don't mind being handled like this curly hair here, you can do it on occasion. Curly hairs are known for being a very docile species that tolerates handling well, which is why this is such a fantastic beginner species. However, there are plenty of species out there, especially in old world tarantulas that are pretty much exclusively a display animal and hands off animal, which is a bummer because orange baboon tarantulas or OBTs are beautiful and I would totally have one if they were more handleable, but they don't want to be held. To remove your tarantula from its enclosure, just like with most other invertebrates, you don't want to reach in and physically pick them up. You instead want to gradually entice them to come out of their enclosure on their own. To do this, you can take something like a pen or maybe a feather to gently touch the hairs on the backs of their legs. This stimulation will typically encourage them to move forward and as long as you don't see any skittishness or defensive behaviors from your tarantula, you can keep going and move your hand into their walking path and then they will walk right onto your hand. This isn't to say they do it every time. Sometimes they just might have woken up on their own side of the bed and they don't want to be held that day for whatever reason. The wrong side of the web. Geez, really? Sometimes they just don't want to be held that day and that's fine. You do have to respect their wishes too. You don't want to force them to come out because that just might encourage defensive behavior from them. You want handling experiences to be positive and calm experiences with your tarantula. When you have them out, you want to keep them no higher than about six inches above the surface below them. That's because if they spook, which sometimes happens, they just jump because something scares them like a shadow or a light or they just feel like jumping. If they fall much further than six inches, it can cause abdominal ruptures, which can kill your tarantula. The arboreal species, which being arboreal live up in trees in the wild, can typically handle falls a lot better than terrestrial species, but you still don't want to risk it. Still don't hold them up at shoulder height or at chest height if you're standing because you might risk them falling and hurting themselves. If your tarantula stops eating, then that is a sign that it's getting held too much because it's getting stressed out. So just stop handling them for several weeks until it's eating regularly again before you start handling them. And when you do start handling them again, after it starts eating, maybe dial it down a little bit and don't handle them quite as frequently. The entire time you're handling one though, just make sure you are closely observing their behavior. And if they are showing defensive postures like rearing back and holding out their legs, they are not happy. Or if they are flicking those urticating hairs at you, they are really not happy. So you'll want to put them back to calm down. But as you can see, and I've been filming for about 45 minutes, Grace here has been extremely calm, just slowly moving around. And if you've been watching how I move my hands, I always provide her a platform to walk onto in front of her. I don't know, maybe I'm anthropomorphizing this, but I think it's easier for them just to continue walking in a straight line and it keeps them nice and calm. So that pretty much covers the basics for tarantula care. And I hope you learned something new today. First off, why these are such cool pets to have and how they are so incredibly easy to take care of. And again, if you have a different species of tarantula that you are keeping or hoping to keep, make sure you continue doing your research, especially on the species you are looking to acquire to ensure that the enclosure parameters like the substrate, the hives, the humidity levels are all correct for that species. As always, I want to thank our amazing Patreon supporters for your generous support. Your contributions actually helped us acquire Grace, our Brachypelma albopilosum or curly hair tarantula, Nicaraguan curly hair tarantula, and her enclosure. So that we could make this video for you and spread tarantula knowledge around the world. So thank you so much for giving us this opportunity. We'd also like to thank everyone for just watching this video and learning about tarantula, especially those who are afraid of tarantulas or spiders in general, like my sister, Grace, who this tarantula is ironically named after. Thank you so much, everybody for watching. And we'll see you next time. One of the many great things about keeping tarantulas as pets, at least curly hairs. Oh, sorry. I can be scary. Tarantula is weak. Oh, geez. That was a good jump. The wrong side of the web. Ha ha. Oh gosh. I don't even know what to say after that. Oh, you're going to stop right there. Are you comfy? Oh, you're so cute.