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Can i feed my slings maggots

Dave Jay

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i have heard mixed things about giving slings maggots.
That would be interesting, I'd like to know too. Of course they'd have to be cultured cleanly, but I have raised flies for frogs before. One reason for not feeding them to some animals is that the skins are designed to be fairly impervious to digestive fluids (could be outdated info) but that's not an issue with spiders.
Soldier fly maggots are sold as "calci-worms" and recommend by some as a good food for reptiles, they can be bred indoors in insect cages, and there's lots of "how to" information out there. They should be commercially available from what I've read in the past.
There's also lots of information on raising maggots laid by "wild" flies too, and lots of variations on how to build equipment to do so also.
I'd be interested to see what people have read or experienced about raising maggots and flies for tarantulas. Flies seem an obvious choice of food for spiders and apart from the bacterial concerns (which can be largely overcome with some methods) I wonder why it is not more common.
One reason may be the high calcium levels in maggots, there's a myth that excess calcium is deposited in the exoskeleton of tarantulas. It's often repeated on AB so I did some research, it's true for inverts like crabs and lobsters, they do fortify parts of their exoskeleton with calcium but it's not how it works in arachnids at all, they just don't utilise calcium in that way.
I just got four tiny slings yesterday, and I mean tiny! I don't think I can legally culture fruit flies here, so I was contemplating raising mosquitoes (yes, the slings are that small!) but little maggots would be better I think.
 

ExoticSte

New Member
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4
Location
Liverpool, England
That would be interesting, I'd like to know too. Of course they'd have to be cultured cleanly, but I have raised flies for frogs before. One reason for not feeding them to some animals is that the skins are designed to be fairly impervious to digestive fluids (could be outdated info) but that's not an issue with spiders.
Soldier fly maggots are sold as "calci-worms" and recommend by some as a good food for reptiles, they can be bred indoors in insect cages, and there's lots of "how to" information out there. They should be commercially available from what I've read in the past.
There's also lots of information on raising maggots laid by "wild" flies too, and lots of variations on how to build equipment to do so also.
I'd be interested to see what people have read or experienced about raising maggots and flies for tarantulas. Flies seem an obvious choice of food for spiders and apart from the bacterial concerns (which can be largely overcome with some methods) I wonder why it is not more common.
One reason may be the high calcium levels in maggots, there's a myth that excess calcium is deposited in the exoskeleton of tarantulas. It's often repeated on AB so I did some research, it's true for inverts like crabs and lobsters, they do fortify parts of their exoskeleton with calcium but it's not how it works in arachnids at all, they just don't utilise calcium in that way.
I just got four tiny slings yesterday, and I mean tiny! I don't think I can legally culture fruit flies here, so I was contemplating raising mosquitoes (yes, the slings are that small!) but little maggots would be better I think.
do you think i should just get meal worms or try maggots?
 

Dave Jay

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I went a bit deeper than that, into the composition of the exoskeletons of various groups of invertebrates, calcium uptake, mineral ratios, how calcium is used in the body etc etc.
The plain fact is calcium is not used in forming a spiders exoskeleton and the excess is not stored in a spiders body in any way, let alone in the exoskeleton.
It took a bit of sorting through University Papers and biological text books but the information is there, it can't be denied.
 

Seekeroftruth

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115
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Tenessee
Aerobic fermented meat is safe for most animals including maggots (including humans... it's called high meat) and I highly doubt that tarantulas are an exception. I would never feed cooked rotted meat to maggots if you plan to feed them to tarantulas as digesting the cooked rotten meat creates toxins (at least in most animals and presumably maggots to some extent. I wouldn't risk it.) I'm no expert on tarantulas but to my understanding, feeding flies/ maggots raw rotten meat/ fish heads ect is fine but again it must be kept aerobic due to the creation of toxins so it need to have airflow frequently or kept open to the air in general. If you don't leave it open to air, It can also create botulism. Botulism can not survive in an aerobic environment. This is why most people get botulims from canned foods and improperly canning their food.... It creates an airtight environment for the bacteria.
 

Seekeroftruth

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Tenessee
I forgot to mention in my last post, the raw meat you feed maggots should not be conventionally raised, especially if we are talking about feeding the maggots organ meats. In the same way this can make humans eating the fermented foods sick, I would not trust feeding conventionally raised and fermented meat to maggots which would be fed to tarantulas.
 

m0lsx

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Norwich, UK
One reason for not feeding them to some animals is that the skins are designed to be fairly impervious to digestive fluids (could be outdated info) but that's not an issue with spiders.

When I get pupa in my mealworms, I always treat them exactly the same as mealworms, I snip an end off the pupa & feed it like that. As I always feel that being fed in that way, a small slings life is a little easier & thus it is more likely to survive. A maggot with the end snipped off, or cut in half & fed to 2 small slings would be easily eaten.
 

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