Invertebrate Emergency Plan: Power Outages, Travel, and Shipping

Invertebrate Emergency Plan: Power Outages, Travel, and Shipping

Ask a reptile keeper what happens to their bearded dragon in a power outage and you get a real answer involving thermometers and hand warmers. Ask a tarantula keeper the same question and the honest answer is usually a shrug. That difference is the whole story of this guide. Most pet invertebrates, tarantulas, scorpions, praying mantises, millipedes, hissing cockroaches, and stick insects, live at ordinary room temperature with no equipment running day to day, so the emergencies that genuinely threaten a reptile or a fish tank barely register for them. The real risk in this corner of pet keeping sits somewhere else entirely: in a car ride, in a shipping box, and in the one commonly kept invertebrate, the hermit crab, that actually does depend on equipment the way a reptile does.

Power Outages: Mostly a Non-Event, With One Real Exception

Start with what a power outage actually threatens. For a reptile, it's heat. For a fish tank, it's a filter and often a heater. For the great majority of pet invertebrates on this list, there's no equipment in the loop to lose in the first place. The University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine notes that pet tarantulas are comfortable across roughly 70 to 85°F, which describes an ordinary living room in most climates for most of the year, not a range that needs a dedicated heat source to maintain. Scorpions, mantises, millipedes, hissing cockroaches, and stick insects are commonly kept the same way, at whatever temperature the room already sits at, with a heat mat reserved for keepers in genuinely cold homes rather than a default requirement.

That means the two things actually worth tracking during an outage for this group are humidity and extreme cold, not a lost heat lamp. A tropical species kept in a sealed, moist enclosure can tolerate a stretch of unmanaged humidity better than it can a house that's turned genuinely cold because a furnace has been off for a stretch in winter. If your home is genuinely losing heat in cold weather, the fix isn't a piece of invertebrate-specific gear, it's the same fix as for the rest of the house: warm blankets over the enclosure, moving it to the warmest interior room, and treating a multi-day cold snap as the actual emergency rather than the outage itself.

That last row is worth saying plainly rather than burying it. A hermit crab is a crustacean, not an arachnid or an insect, and it breathes through modified gills that need consistently warm, moist air to function at all. That's an actively maintained condition, not a comfortable-room condition, which puts a hermit crab's outage risk much closer to a reptile's or a fish's than to a tarantula's. If you keep hermit crabs, a battery-powered backup for the heat source and a plan for holding humidity, a sealed lid and damp substrate, belongs in your outage kit the same way it would for a reptile. For the actual numbers and setup, our hermit crab tank setup guide covers the heat and humidity targets this exception is built around.

Leaving Town: Reasoning Through It Without a Fixed Number

There's a genuine temptation to print a clean answer here, a tarantula is fine alone for X days, and move on. That number doesn't hold up to scrutiny once you look for where it actually comes from, so it isn't in this article. What holds up instead is the reasoning, and the reasoning is actually more useful than a number would be, because it tells you what to check rather than what to assume.

Start with food. The University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine describes the period a tarantula stops eating before and during a molt as a completely normal physiologic fast, not a sign of distress, and its general feeding guidance for a healthy adult is a few times a week, not daily. Put those two facts together and a short trip's missed meals simply aren't the constraint people assume they are. A tarantula that skips its normal feeding for several days because you're out of town is not meaningfully different from one fasting through a molt, which it does on its own schedule regardless of what you're doing.

Water is the tighter constraint, and it's also the simpler one to solve before you leave. A full, shallow water dish, refilled the morning you go, changed for a fresh one, and stable ambient humidity in a properly sealed enclosure are what a short absence actually needs, more than any feeding schedule. That's true across most of this group, scorpions, mantises, millipedes, and roaches all do better on a topped-off water source and a checked lid than on any attempt to pre-feed extra insects before a trip, which mostly just leaves live prey wandering the enclosure while you're gone, a stress and injury risk in its own right that our invertebrate molting guide touches on in more detail for an animal that's due to shed soon.

Hermit crabs break this pattern the same way they break the power outage pattern. Because they depend on actively maintained heat and humidity rather than a comfortable room, a hermit crab genuinely needs someone checking equipment during any real absence, in a way a tarantula in the next room over simply doesn't. Treat a hermit crab trip like a reptile trip: someone needs to be able to read a thermometer and hygrometer and know what to do if either reading has drifted.

Transport: Where the Real Risk Actually Lives

If power outages are mostly a non-event for this group, transport is the opposite. A tarantula's abdomen, the rounded rear section that holds most of its organs and body fluid, is covered by a thin cuticle with none of the structural reinforcement of the legs or front body. A fall of even a modest height, off a hand, a table edge, or a shifting car seat, can rupture that abdomen, and a ruptured abdomen is close to unsurvivable without immediate intervention. That single fact should shape every transport decision you make with a tarantula, and it's the reason handling and moving a tarantula gets its own caution separate from every other part of its care, covered in more depth in our tarantula tank setup guide.

In a car:

• Use a secure, ventilated, genuinely escape-proof container, never a loose box or an open-top cup.
• Line it with soft substrate or folded paper towel to cushion any sliding or bouncing rather than leaving the animal on a bare, slick surface.
• Wedge the container so it can't tip, slide off a seat, or roll around, upright and stable is the goal, not just contained.
• Keep the container in the passenger area with you, never in a trunk, where temperature swings are worse and there's no way to check on the animal mid-drive.
• Avoid temperature extremes entirely. Don't leave the container in a hot closed car in summer or a freezing one in winter, even briefly, the swing inside a parked car happens faster than most people expect.

By hand:

• Move slowly and low to the ground, over a table or a bed rather than open floor, so a startled drop has somewhere soft and close to land.
• Never carry a tarantula over hard flooring, tile, or concrete if it can be avoided.
• Scorpions, mantises, and millipedes are generally sturdier against a short fall than a tarantula is, but the same low, slow, cushioned-surface habit is still the safer default across this whole group.
• Hermit crabs tolerate brief handling reasonably well but should go back into their humidity-controlled setup quickly rather than spend an extended trip out of it.

Shipping: Legal, Routine, and Genuinely Rule-Bound

Shipping live invertebrates across the country is a normal, legal part of the hobby in the US, and it happens constantly between breeders, sellers, and keepers. It is not, however, a free-for-all, and the rules that do exist are worth knowing in outline even though the specifics change and vary by carrier, species, and destination.

Start with the US Postal Service, since it's the carrier most people think of first and the one with the clearest published restriction. USPS's own mailing standards are blunt. Section 525.4 reads: "All poisonous insects and all spiders are nonmailable, except for scorpions under limited circumstances." Section 526.5 gives that exception in full: "Scorpions are mailable only when sent for the purposes of medical research or the manufacturing of antivenin," and even then only for delivery within the continental United States and only by surface transportation. Small, harmless, cold-blooded animals including nonpoisonous insects sit in a separate category with no additional requirements beyond the standard packaging rules. In practical terms, that means a pet tarantula or a display-purpose scorpion isn't going through the regular mail at all, which is why the live invertebrate trade in this hobby runs largely through other carriers' dedicated live-animal shipping programs instead, each with its own packaging, timing, and destination rules. Those programs and their current terms are something you check directly with the carrier before shipping, not something this article states on a carrier's behalf, since carrier policy is exactly the kind of thing that changes without much notice.

Beyond carrier rules, two federal frameworks can apply depending on species. USDA APHIS regulates the interstate movement of plant-feeding insects and mites under a permit system aimed primarily at agricultural risk, though it carries specific exemptions, including for arthropod colonies in the established feeder insect trade that are already maintained domestically rather than freshly imported. Separately, the US Fish and Wildlife Service's injurious wildlife list under the Lacey Act can restrict the interstate transport of specific species, including certain crustaceans and mollusks, when the Service has formally designated them a risk to US ecosystems, agriculture, or wildlife, with permits available only for zoological, educational, medical, or scientific purposes. Most commonly kept pet invertebrates in this guide aren't on that list, but "most" isn't "all," and state law adds another layer on top of both federal frameworks that varies by state and by species.

None of that adds up to a simple yes-or-no answer, and it shouldn't. The honest summary is that shipping a live invertebrate is legal and routine in general, some species and some destinations are genuinely restricted, and the only reliable way to ship correctly is to check the current policy of the specific carrier you intend to use alongside current state and federal rules for that exact species, every time, rather than trusting general hobby knowledge or an article like this one to still be accurate by the time you ship.

Build a Pet-Sitter Sheet for an Invertebrate

An invertebrate pet-sitter sheet looks different from a dog or cat version, and it's shorter than you'd expect. Most of the value is in what it tells a sitter not to do.

Contact block: your phone number, a backup contact, and the name of any local exotic vet if you have one, even though invertebrate-specific veterinary care is limited in most areas.

The basics, written out: what the enclosure needs day to day, if anything, water dish refills and roughly how often, and what a normal-looking animal looks like versus one that's simply mid-molt and should be left alone.

The do-not list, which matters more than the do list:

• Don't feed anything not already portioned or written down.
• Don't mist, adjust, or add water beyond what's specified, overwatering is a more common sitter mistake than underwatering.
• Don't open the enclosure to look closer, take photos through the glass instead.
• Don't attempt to handle, move, or "help" the animal for any reason.
• Don't remove uneaten live prey by hand, leave it or ask you what to do.

A clear call-me-if list: the animal is out of its enclosure, water has visibly spilled or run dry, or anything looks obviously wrong, discoloration, a fluid leak, or a fall. For hermit crabs specifically, add a heat and humidity check to that list, since those are the readings most likely to drift into a real problem during a longer absence.

Walk a new sitter through the actual enclosure once before leaving them alone with it, the same practice-visit principle that applies to reptile and small mammal sitters, covered in more depth in our reptile emergency plan guide for anyone managing a mixed collection of exotic pets under one roof. A quick walkthrough answers questions a written sheet can't anticipate, and it's the difference between a sitter who calls you with a real concern and one who quietly panics over completely normal behavior, like the pre-molt fast this guide already covers.

Sources & Further Reading