I wanted to share with you one of my latest additions to my collection. This is the Pterinopelma sazimai, commonly known as the Brazilian Blue tarantula. I haven’t had any experience with this species so I’m reading up as much about it as I can since I have four of these babies to care for. They are about a quarter of an inch long at the moment and they don’t have any of the adult coloration at all. From my experience I would say that they are about 2nd instar.
So far my experience with them has been quite surprising. These are new world, terrestrial tarantulas. When I first unpacked them they were pretty quick but once I put them in the enclosure they wanted to run around and try to get out of it. I had to handle a couple of them because they crawled right out of the enclosure and they were a pain to put back in. They kept running around my hand until I finally manipulated them back into the enclosure. A couple of days later I was checking on them and I opened one of their enclosures and it darted out and ran over my hand and tried to run away. I have never experienced this with terrestrials. Usually they settle in nicely and start to burrow and I don’t have to worry about them trying to get out unless they are disturbed. So far I’m finding that they are feisty little slings that move quickly and don’t like to stay put.
As far as feeding is concerned, I probably should be feeding them fruit flies but I don’t have any and the pet shop was out. I placed a tiny discoid roach, that are almost the size of my p. sazimai, into the enclosures. I pinched the heads of the roaches to kill them first so that they wouldn’t pose a threat to my slings. Thankfully, tarantulas are quite the survivors and each of the spiderlings quickly found the roach carcass and began feeding on it. Whew! My feeding worries were over. They’ve been feeding well and should gain some size pretty quickly so I won’t have to worry about them so much. Really looking forward to growing these little guys into adulthood.