Hello! About 2 weeks ago my first T arrived from fearnot, a \~1” GBB sling. I named her(?) Audrey! I think everything’s been going well, she’s been webbing great and has a very active feeding response, but Google is pretty sparse on info (especially with all the AI integration, ugh) so I had a couple questions if any of you folks had some advice!

\- Are captive raised adult bluebottle flies ok food for a sling of this size? My mom keeps jumping spiders and mantids so we have an excess of them, but there’s pretty much no info online regarding if they’re good for slings. I gave one as food 2 days ago (stunned in the fridge first) and Audrey caught and killed it near instantly and ate it completely over the next 4 hours or so. I wasn’t aware at the time, but now I know that the rule of thumb is to keep feeders about the size of the abdomen but that fly was pretty big (about the size of the sling’s entire body not including legs) and it got devoured pretty quickly. Should I just stick to small crickets/roaches to be safe or are the flies ok as a primary food source for now? 

\-Is the size of the abdomen ok in these photos? I’ve been trying to be careful with avoiding overfeeding. I’ve given food 3 times since I got Audrey 2 weeks ago, once the day after arrival and every 5 days since. I fed her the small crickets the fearnot bundle came with the first two times and the bluebottle fly the third. She’s been pretty much immediately catching and eating anything I put in her enclosure and hasn’t refused anything yet. After the fly though she’s definitely starting to look a little hefty, so I just wanted to err on the side of caution.

\-Last thing, I haven’t seen any boluses yet from anything she’s eaten and I was wondering how important it is to find/remove them? Since Audrey’s a sling she’ll only be in this enclosure for a couple more months before I have to rehouse her. Honestly I have no clue where they could possibly be and I’ve looked around in the enclosure and found nothing. Do they just not make boluses sometimes? I’m probably overthinking it but figured I might as well ask.

Sorry for the long post, I’ve just been very excited to have a tarantula for a while now and I want to make sure Audrey is as happy and healthy as possible! Thanks for any/all advice :)

Picked up my first sling recently, had a couple questions about feeding