gekosin wrote: Morning all
Got my first T a few months ago and currently sitting with 3 in total, interested in reptiles and arachnids alike and have a small collection of 'kids' at home ...
First -
WELCOME TO THE HOBBY!
:happy:
:drunk:
WELCOME TO THIS FORUM!
welcome
:thumbsup:
While you're rapidly growing out of the newbie category, I'm still going to assail with my canned newbie introduction. This is just to make sure that you're starting out with the right foot.
DID YOU HEAR THAT? THAT WAS THE NEWBIE ALARM!
Ah! So we're a newbie. You've done what everybody else does: Read all the Internet care sheets. Listened attentively to everything the expert down at the local pet shop told you. Spent a lot of money on things you shouldn't have. Incorporated a lot of things that were useless or even dangerous. Stressed out over meaningless details while ignoring the real issues. Way overkill. That's not a criticism; I'm just delineating the problems. It's just the way humanoids are, I suppose. We can deal with all that.
There's nothing wrong with being a newbie as long as you do something about it. After 45 years of keeping tarantulas, I still consider myself a newbie. We can trace a tarantula's ancestry back over
HALF A BILLION YEARS. They've had that long to develop and fine tune their lives and lifestyles. They're incredibly complex and detailed creatures. We're gonna be playing catch-up (that's the newbie part) for a long, LONG,
LONG time!
The first thing you need to understand is the
KISS principle
, not to infer that you're stupid. Inexperienced, maybe. Stupid, I don't think so. As proof, you can speak, read, and write English (arguably one of the more difficult languages on Planet Earth), and use a computer just fine. But, I digress. As long as you supply the basic necessities of life for your captive tarantula, the less you incorporate into its cage and care regimen, the less there is to go tragically
haywire
. KISS, indeed!
The second thing you need to understand is that tarantulas are like no other creature you've ever kept or even heard of before. All the ingrained assumptions and prejudices that you've been taught since childhood don't apply, and may even be dangerous to them. They're neither tropical fish, reptiles, canaries, nor gerbils, and you don't take care of them like any of those animals. One of the biggest problems with newbies is trying to get them to abandon all their prejudices and begin to look at the world from the vastly alien perspective of a huge, fuzzy spider.
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT.
MAKE SURE YOUR SEAT BACK AND TRAY TABLE ARE SECURED IN THEIR UPRIGHT POSITIONS.
THIS IS GOING TO BE ONE H*** OF A RIDE!
Because tarantulas are so bizarre and unique, you have a lot of homework to do. To begin, you need to read the following webpages.
1)
Stan's Rant
.
ESPECIALLY, READ THE PART ABOUT NOT TRUSTING ANYTHING A PET SHOP TELLS YOU! AND ESPECIALLY, [Strike]READ[/Strike] STUDY THE FOUR RECOMMENDED BOOKS.
2)
Myths...
. Read the entire webpage tree.
3)
Care and Husbandry of the Chilean Rose Tarantula
. If you don't have a Chilean rose you can safely ignore this one for now. Just remember that it's here for whenever you do get a rose. Or, you can read it out of curiosity. It contains a lot of hints applicable to other arid species.
4)
Substrate
. Because you need to know about this very basic, underlying part of a tarantula's existence.
5)
Growing Your Tarantula
. This is a global, game plan for caring for your newfound little buddy. You need to figure out where it is in the vast scheme of growth and development, then start taking care of it properly from that point onward.
6) If you can possibly spare the time, at least skim through the entire
Spiders, Calgary
website.
Lastly, be aware that this system is not the only one available. Neither is it necessarily the best one. You'll see and hear all sorts of other ideas as you go along. But, Marguerite and I have spent decades selling tarantulas to all kinds of people of all ages, and fine tuned this system so as to make it pretty much as bullet proof as it can get. Use our system at first, until you begin to understand these weird animals. Then maybe you can experiment with some of the no-so-conservative approaches recommended by others.
Best of luck. Remember, your little 8-legged Yoda is going to be giving you pop quizzes daily!
hope to learn a lot from everyone and will try my best to help where I can!
