Spider yoga?
I also found this beautiful moth at work.
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Lol she is working out 
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My dog Rudy and I were walking today and I saw this cool woolly worm and of course when I tried to take the picture Rudy was pulling on his leash as he always does so I couldn’t get a very good picture but maybe you can see him!
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Wow, I think if the wives tale is true, we are doomed this winter from the looks of that one! No orange at all!
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That’s interesting! I didn’t know about the orange but that little guy was moving quickly. It was on a mission to get somewhere and fast! Lol. 
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Well, Pixie just attacked my tongs. 
I tossed her a dubia, which did what dubias do and played dead, so I poked it with my tongs to try to get it to move…and she attacked the tongs and started to climb them before she seemed to realize her mistake and jumped down into her enclosure. Whew! I won’t repeat what I said, but I was very startled, to say the least. She’s got quite the savage feeding response for such a cute little curly hair! (And she did eventually get the dubia.)
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Very cool! We have similar fuzzy caterpillars here, though ours are usually jet black. In fact, I’m pretty sure our black ones metamorphose into the moth in my picture above from earlier today. I think someone told me it’s called a leopard moth, though I’m not sure if that’s correct. I wonder if your fuzzy caterpillars turn into something similar.
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Well that moth is beautiful! It’s amazing how it started out as a fuzzy black caterpillar! Maybe that’s where this caterpillar was going! To change into a moth or a butterfly! Nature is so grand! 
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Thats the reason I use really long tongs! Don’t remember which it was, but one of mine clumbed the tongs and escapednfor like 10 minutes!
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Yeah at @spottedbull warned me about the tongs thing so I quit feeding my biggest T’s with them for that very reason! Lol! As a matter of fact my white knee did that once! So I think I have an idea of just what you uttered in surprise! Lol!
Btw when I drop dubias in my T’s enclosures they bury themselves right away instead of playing dead so I remove them because I don’t know if the T’s can find them? So I just feed large crickets instead. 
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Is that Miss Wolf spider? If so she is doing her yoga to get back in shape after giving birth to thousands of babies!
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I don’t really like using the long tongs for feeding the spiders (even though I have several pairs I use for the snakes). I have a shorter pair of plastic tongs that I like for feeder insects because the grip is pretty gentle, so I can catch insects without accidentally squishing them. But the shorter length has some drawbacks, as I’ve just discovered. I think I’ll be using my long-handled paintbrush for dubia-poking in the future.
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I don’t “tong feed” in the sense that I try to get the spider to strike the feeder off the tongs, I just use the tongs to catch the bugs and drop them in. This time I was just trying to get the stupid thing to move to trigger a feeding response, and got more feeding response than I bargained for.
Dubias can be a little tricky. I have pretty good luck when I’m able to drop them right in front of the T, but if my aim is off, they either sit there like statues or start to burrow. Though often if they try to burrow, that triggers my tarantulas’ feeding response and they pounce and grab them before they get very far.
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Yup, that’s Tala. I guess it’s Mommy and Me yoga.
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I actually didn’t mean tong feed. I should have said drop feed with tongs. But like you I got an unexpected feeding response! Lol! 
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Since my T is older (we think 10+), my mom actually sort of trained her in a way. We take the tongs and tap her glass, her rock, and one of her toes. If she stands up higher on her toes, we know she is active and hungry, if she doesn’t respond or turns away from the vibration, not hungry. This has an almost 100% success rate with feeding responses, though I have no idea how it would work with other species or even individuals since feeding aggression and overall aggression ranges so highly.
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That sounds so so cool! 
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Yeah I just drop the feeders in with the tongs too. I have tried a few times to get them to take off the tongs. But the either hit metal, climb the metal or it startles them and they kick hairs!
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That’s super interesting that you’ve trained/conditioned her with feeding that way! My tarantulas pretty much run for their burrows if I tap on their enclosure, and often run and hide when I just pick up the enclosure. But they’re still juveniles, so maybe they’ll be less flighty as they mature. And their feeding responses are great.
I’m pretty conservative with my feeding, in that I wait until their abdomens have lost a little plumpness since their last meal before feeding them again, rather than feeding on a set schedule. This seems to ensure that they’re actually hungry (and not in premolt) when I feed, so it’s been ages since I had to fish an uneaten feeder out of their enclosure. I’m sure they’re growing more slowly than if I fed them every week and kept them perpetually plump, but I think that’s probably preferable to over-feeding. I kinda suspect that much like snakes, we have a tendency to over-feed our captive spiders, and it probably doesn’t do them any favours. Admittedly, I can’t point to any hard scientific evidence to support that theory, but since over-feeding can have negative health implications for virtually every other animal, I don’t see why spiders would be the exception. 
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I totally agree with your over feeding opinion! I have a problem though with a few of my T’s because they are burrowers and only come out at night so I don’t see them very often to be able to see their abdomens.
The tap training that @cmills was talking about sounds really interesting though!
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