Care Guide - Rain Spider

Overview

The rain spider is a nickname for a species of huntsman spider native to south africa, they can often be found on rainly days hiding out under dryer areas such as peoples patio ceiling and indoor walls and ceilings hence the name rain spider. They are fairly big as adults with a legspan between 9-11cm.

Cost to keep -

Distribution - 

Rating - (Ease of care) - Intermediate - ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Setup Requirements - 20x20x30 enclosure will be perfect you can offer more if you want to, you can either use a plastic enclosure or a glass terrarium, as they do not need much above 50-60% humidity glass vivs with mesh on time allow the humidity to settle near most indoor uk homes at around 60% relative humidity.

Substrate options and decor - You can use a substrate like cocofibre mixed with top soil and then add a bit of leaf litter to the bottom to sustain humidity, put some bits of decor such as cork bark and aquarium decor, this can be rocks or structures, they love to hide away whithin these during daytime hours.

Heating and lighting -  They dont really need any additonal heat past whats offered in must household homes you can use a heatmat to keep one side of the enclosure above 20c, if your confortable then they will be, nighttime drops down to 18c are sufficent and are confortable with this, during the summer i found 22-28 is a good range and they are more likely to be acive during evening periods where they hunt. If you have a particullaly cold house i would suggest getting a heatmat and heatstat as show below and set it for 22-24c and put it on one side of the glass, the heatmat should cover no less than two thirds of the glass.

Diet and nutrition - 

Like any huntsman spider they love insects that can fly and which they can hunt down, during there earlier stages of life giving them fruit flies until there abdomen is around the size of a soldier fly, then you can move onto bigger prey items such as soldier flies and small locusts and crickets. The food needs to be mobile all types of worms are a jno go as the huntsman will not go for them, stick to insects that can fly and climb. Once adults you can also feed them blue and green bottle flies.

Behaviours -

Day and night Cycle -

Common health issues -

Genaral wild caught issues - As the majority of these are wild caught they can be bought from petshops and such with underlying problems that are not apparent to the buyer or petshop owner, unfortunatly this is one of the issues with buying wild caught.

Dehydration -

Starvation -

Cleaning -  As they are so fast i would suggest doing this in a bathroom on occasion remove any dead invert corpses from the enclosure and watch for the spider, they usually would rather hide away while your cleaning but it just takes that one time it gets overly spooked and does a runner. You really dont have to do this very often maybe every 3-6 months just to keep on top of it.

Brumation - No Brumation, they have a slowdown period during the winter months and may not eat as much this is ususally due to the temprature decreases within a usual uk room during this time period.

Avalability - They are not very avalable at the moment, the seems to be brought in once a year wild caught shipments , it would be nice to see some captive bred specimins as they are facinating to watch hunt and not super hard to keep. The specimen i had sadly run its course but i would 100% grab one when there next avalable. I had spoken to another hobbyist and we had come to agreement to breed them if possible if they where the right sex and age but sadly the other hobbist didnt have the best luck with his one and it perished after 6 months.

References-

Gallery -

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