Jumping Spider Feeding: Schedule, Diet, and Why They Stop Eating

A jumping spider's abdomen tells you more than any calendar does, it's the feeding guide here. Here's a schedule by life stage, what to feed, and how to read one that's stopped eating.

Feeding Schedule by Life Stage

• Spiderlings (1st to 3rd instar): Fed most often, generally every 1 to 2 days on 1 to 2 flightless fruit flies. One breeder source recommends even more frequent daily small feedings at this stage, a real difference in intensity, not just phrasing.
• Small to mid juveniles: Every 2 to 3 days, stepping up to larger fruit flies, then pinhead crickets or small houseflies.
• Sub-adults: Every 2 to 4 days. Avoid overfeeding right before the final molt, a distended abdomen raises rupture risk during that molt.
• Adults: This is where sources diverge most, reported intervals range from every 2 to 3 days up to every 3 to 5 days, with males in particular sometimes fed as infrequently as every 10 days by one source. Gravid, egg-guarding females may eat more often or refuse food almost entirely during guarding, both patterns show up across sources, so either is normal individual variation.

The consistent advice across every source: offer food rather than force a schedule, and let the abdomen guide you. A shrunken or wrinkled abdomen means it's hungry and can be fed early. A plump, rounded abdomen noticeably wider than the cephalothorax means skip the next feeding. Feed in the morning, jumping spiders are visual daytime hunters, and pull uneaten live prey within a few hours to overnight so it doesn't harass or injure the spider, especially near a molt.

What Jumping Spiders Eat

An obligate carnivore, no plant matter and no commercial spider food. Flightless fruit flies are the staple for slings and small juveniles. Pinhead-to-small crickets, houseflies, and bluebottle or greenbottle flies work for juveniles through adults, flies in particular are a preferred, low-injury-risk staple since they can't bite back or burrow. Small dubia roach nymphs are another low-risk option. Mealworms and waxworms work as occasional treats rather than staples, waxworms especially are high in fat and best used sparingly, some keepers save them for a post-molt energy boost.

Keep prey noticeably smaller than the spider, roughly no bigger than the abdomen, matched to the size of the chelicerae. Oversized prey is the most repeated safety warning here, a cricket that's too big can injure or kill a jumping spider, especially near a molt.

Gut-load feeder insects on a nutritious diet, pureed carrot, apple, or a sugar-yeast mix for fruit fly cultures, for a day or two before offering them, so the spider gets those nutrients secondhand. This matters most for breeding or gravid females. For hydration, use a shallow water dish and light daily misting of the enclosure walls for drinking droplets, never mist the spider's abdomen directly, water can seep between the book-lung plates and cause suffocation.

Safe and Unsafe Prey

Safe: flightless fruit flies, pinhead-to-small crickets, houseflies, bluebottle and greenbottle flies, small dubia roach nymphs, gut-loaded mealworms, and waxworms as an occasional treat.

Never feed: ants, repeatedly named as the single most important thing to avoid, they can bite or spray formic acid, and jumping spiders show an instinctive fear response to them. Hard-shelled beetles and pill bugs, too tough to bite through effectively. Fireflies. Other spiders, a real cannibalism and injury risk. Wild-caught or unknown insects, especially anything from an area treated with pesticides. And any prey larger than roughly the spider's own body size, an injury risk regardless of species.

Why Jumping Spiders Stop Eating

1. Premolt fasting. Commonly stops eating days to weeks before shedding, windows vary widely, from a few days for spiderlings up to a few weeks for larger juveniles and sub-adults. Don't force-feed or leave live prey in during this window.
2. Post-molt recovery. New fangs are soft right after shedding and can't safely bite or digest prey. Wait about 2 to 3 days before offering food again.
3. Breeding and egg-guarding. Courting adults, and especially females guarding an egg sac, can eat noticeably more or less than usual, either direction is considered normal.
4. Environmental stress. Temperatures too cool, low humidity, recent rehousing, or excessive handling can trigger refusal outside of a molting window.
5. Old age. Older adults, particularly past their final molt, naturally slow their feeding pace, sometimes fasting a week or more, occasionally up to a month, without indicating illness.
6. Prey pickiness. Individual spiders can be selective, preferring flies over crickets or vice versa, and may ignore a feeder they simply don't want even while healthy.
7. Dehydration or illness. Refusal paired with a shrunken, raisin-like abdomen, lethargy, poor jumping ability, or curled-inward legs points to a real problem, not a normal fasting phase.

When to Worry

There's no single universally-cited number of days here, and this guidance is entirely hobbyist-reported rather than veterinary-established, worth knowing going in. Rough consensus: a healthy adult can safely go roughly 2 to 3 weeks without eating, and older adults are anecdotally reported tolerating a month or more, particularly around a molt or egg-guarding, none of that alone is cause for alarm. Spiderlings have much smaller reserves and shouldn't be left that long, keep offering appropriately sized food every couple of days at that stage even if it's sometimes refused.

Real reasons for concern: food refusal running well past two weeks with no molt ever occurring, no interest in food for a week or more after a molt has already completed, a visibly shrunken or wrinkled abdomen especially paired with lethargy, legs curling inward or an inability to right itself if flipped, visible injury or fluid leakage, and a failed or stuck molt, a spider partially out of its old exoskeleton with no progress for several hours. These last few are treated as urgent, warranting an exotic-animal vet rather than a wait-and-see approach.

Spiders can't be dusted with supplement powder, which makes what the feeders ate the only nutrition that reaches them, see our gut-loading feeder insects guide for how to handle that.

The Jumping Spider encyclopedia profile has the wild background.

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Sources & Further Reading