Care Guide

A keeper's guide to jumping spider care
with AlienKeeper

Before we got into tarantulas, our very first spiders were a couple of jumping spiders. Since then we have bred several generations, raising a few hundred jumpers along the way, and every one of them was tracked in AlienKeeper. Our goal was to give them the longest, healthiest life we could in captivity — and we reached results we are proud of. Jumpers rarely live as long in the wild. AlienKeeper was built with jumping spiders in mind, and it can help keepers raise the quality of their care and make the hobby more joyful.

For 1 jumper or 30+ Spiderlings, juveniles, adults Phidippus regius & more
Phidippus regius (royal jumping spider) female kept and tracked in AlienKeeper

What's in this guide

This guide is mostly about Phidippus regius (the royal jumping spider), but the same ideas work for many other jumping spider species.

01 Feeding intervals & the tracker 02 Feeder rotation & variety 03 Watering schedules 04 Pre-molt, molt & post-molt 05 Trends & charts 06 Photo timelines & profiles 07 Notes & sticky notes 08 Share care with others 09 File uploads per animal 10 Cloud backup 11 Common questions
01 · Feeding tracker

Interval feeding for jumpers
works surprisingly well

Small jumpers in captivity eat fruit flies. They start on the small ones (Drosophila melanogaster) and, as they grow, you can switch to larger fruit flies (Drosophila hydei). As they get bigger you can add red runner roaches (Shelfordella lateralis), small dubia roaches, and mealworms — but the food they love most is flies and crickets.

How does the jumping spider feeding tracker help? You just set a feeding interval. If you keep a lot of tiny jumpers, make one group card so you don't have to track every baby on its own. If you only have a few, give each its own card and assign them to a space — we have a "Jumpers" space where we currently keep around 20 of them. In the space settings you add the feeders you use, and the app keeps the schedule for you.

Babies every other day
Average size twice a week
Older juveniles once a week
Adults every 7–10 days
  • Babies should always have a few live fruit flies in the enclosure
  • The tracker sorts every animal with feeding turned on by hunger level — the most overdue float to the top
  • Use feeders smaller than your spider — never bigger
  • Every feeding is logged with the feeder used, so you can pick a different one next time
Keeper note. Don't do what some YouTubers do and drop in a cricket twice the size of your jumper. There is a good chance the jumper gets hurt, and overfed jumpers turn into little balloons — which makes them fragile and prone to health problems. What we have seen over and over: overfed jumpers do not live long. The longest-lived ones always had meaningful gaps between feedings.
AlienKeeper jumping spider feeding tracker showing what the jumper ate and if it is hungry
02 · Feeder rotation

Give your jumper
a varied diet

It is important to feed a varied diet. In nature jumping spiders don't eat only mealworms — they almost always catch something new. With small ones it is hard to rotate feeders much, but you can mix fruit flies with micro crickets. As they grow, rotation gets a lot easier.

For adults it is good to have at least 3–4 different feeders, and the more the better. What we feed most are flies, crickets, red runners, the occasional mealworm, very small superworms, and small dubia roaches. Jumpers are resilient and can manage on just a few feeders, but would you want to eat the same thing every single day? As keepers, our job is to get as close to natural conditions as we can.

  • Add your own feeders — fruit flies, crickets, red runners, roaches, worms — or pick from built-in feeder packs
  • See what each jumper was last fed at a glance
  • Use the log to choose a feeder different from last time
  • Spot which feeders each animal actually accepts
Why variety matters. A varied diet means better nutrition and a healthier, happier jumper. The feeding log makes it easy to rotate without trying to remember what you offered last week.
AlienKeeper feeder chart showing which feeders the jumping spider accepted
03 · Watering schedules

Water is the
number one rule for jumpers

Keeping tiny baby jumping spiders is the hardest part of the hobby — they are very fragile. The single most important thing to track for them is watering. They can go a while without food, but without water you start losing them, sometimes in as little as 3 days.

For the smallest jumpers we track watering every other day. As they grow into average size, every 3rd day is enough. Our adults drink every 3–4 days, and every single time we offer water, all of them drink — we have yet to see a jumper turn down a drink. Regular watering is one of the main keys to a long, happy life. Do not underestimate it.

How we do it. Just spray a little water on the enclosure wall or next to their web. For a jumper in pre-molt, spray gently nearby so it can come out and drink without being disturbed.
  • Custom watering interval per animal
  • Reminders so the schedule never quietly slips
  • Tighter intervals for fragile babies, looser for adults
AlienKeeper jumping spider watering schedules
04 · Molt tracking & DND

Pre-molt, molt, post-molt.
A jumping spider molt tracker that remembers for you

Before molting, jumpers stop eating and usually start to web a lot — you'll notice a thicker web, and often they seal it off from every side. This is when our DND (Do Not Disturb) feature helps, so you don't forget to stop feeding a pre-molt jumper. Never leave live prey in the enclosure of a spider in pre-molt. It stresses the spider, can interrupt the molt, and a cricket can even injure the jumper while it is soft. At this stage, just keep offering a little water every few days.

After a molt, jumpers need time for the new exoskeleton to harden. If you track molts with AlienKeeper, it takes one click to set post-molt DND. For small jumpers that's around 3 days; for older ones 5–7 days. Keep offering water every other day while they are fragile. Once DND ends, start feeding again — it's good to begin with easier prey.

  • Pre-molt → DND on, remove live feeders, keep water nearby
  • Molt → log it, add photos for the memories
  • Post-molt → DND ~3 days for babies, 5–7 for older jumpers
  • Full molt history per animal stays available forever
    • Why this is worth tracking. When you have a shelf full of jumpers at different stages, keeping track of who is in pre-molt, who just molted, and who is due to feed is genuinely hard to hold in your head. The molt tracker takes that load off you.
    AlienKeeper jumping spider molt tracking
    05 · Trends & charts

    See the patterns
    behind your jumpers

    After a few months of feedings, molts and watering, the small notes add up into a bigger picture. AlienKeeper turns them into simple charts — how much each jumper eats, which feeders it prefers, and how its molts space out as it grows. It is an easy way to spot what is normal for your animals, and to notice when something changes.

    📊

    Feedings per month

    See how much each jumper is eating over time. If feedings start dropping off, that can be an early sign of pre-molt — or a hint you were feeding a bit too often.

    🍽️

    Most used feeders

    Which feeders does this jumper actually take? The chart shows your most offered feeders, so you can keep the diet varied instead of reaching for crickets every single time.

    🔄

    Molt intervals

    How often is this jumper molting, and how has that stretched as it has grown? Seeing molt intervals on a chart tells you a lot about where each animal is in its life.

    06 · Photo timelines & profiles

    Possibly the cutest
    arachnids on Earth

    Jumping spiders are possibly the cutest arachnids on the planet, and we love taking photos of them. It mattered to us that those photos didn't just sit in some folder on a hard drive we're too lazy to open. With jumpers there's also the tricky part: over time they start to look very similar, and it gets hard to remember which one is in which photo.

    AlienKeeper gives every jumper its own photo timeline. With time it becomes a valuable archive and backup. Watching a tiny baby grow into a big adult, and keeping that memory with you, is one of the most rewarding parts of the hobby — and one of the most valuable features there is. You don't even have to track care to use it; a profile with photos works on its own.

    • Per-animal photo timeline, in order from baby to adult
    • Profile cards even for jumpers you are not tracking
    • Keep memories of animals you have rehomed or lost
    • Photos saved in the cloud, not lost in a huge camera roll
    AlienKeeper photo timeline showing a jumping spider growing up
    07 · Notes & sticky notes

    Every jumper has
    its own little diary

    Jumpers have personality, and you start to notice the small stuff — this one always hunts from the lid, that one hid for a day after a rehouse, another took a feeder it usually ignores. Drop those observations into the animal's notes and they stay attached to the jumper they belong to, ready whenever you want to look back.

    When something can't wait, turn it into a sticky note. It pins to the top of the jumper's card so it's the first thing you see — a lid that isn't closing right, a leg you want to watch after a molt, a baby you're worried is too thin. It stays there nagging you until you deal with it.

    • Notes per jumper, synced to every device
    • Sticky notes pinned on top for anything urgent
    • Attach a photo to a note to record exactly what you saw
    AlienKeeper notes and sticky notes for jumping spiders
    08 · Share care

    Keep jumpers together,
    track them together

    If you keep your jumpers with someone else — a partner or a friend — AlienKeeper makes it easy to share access. Invite people to help you track feedings and molts, or just to enjoy looking through your photos.

    All changes sync almost instantly between every open web app session, so whoever fed last, everyone sees it right away. No more "did you water the jumpers?" guesswork.

    • Invite people to help track or just to watch along
    • Changes sync almost instantly across devices
    • Everyone sees the latest feedings, molts and notes
    Jumping spider babies in their keeping boxes, shared and tracked together in AlienKeeper
    09 · File uploads

    Keep care guides with
    the jumper they're about

    Found a good care guide or a study? Have an old spreadsheet with feeding logs? Don't throw it into a random folder on your hard drive where you'll never find it again. Upload it to your animals in AlienKeeper instead.

    Every jumper has its own files tab. Attach anything you want kept with that specific animal, and next time you need it you'll always know exactly where it is.

  • Per-animal files tab — keep references organized
  • Attach PDFs, spreadsheets, and documents
    • AlienKeeper file uploads for jumping spider care guides
    10 · Cloud backup

    Your jumpers live on the shelf.
    Their records live in the cloud.

    A jumper might be with you for a year or two, and along the way you build up a whole history — feeding dates, molt records, watering, and a photo timeline from baby to adult. That history deserves a safer home than a single phone. AlienKeeper saves everything online the moment you tap it, so you can open the app on your phone, your partner's phone, or a laptop and see the exact same thing. If a device is ever lost or broken, your records aren't — you just log in somewhere else and carry on. No manual exports, no backups to remember, no folder of screenshots you hope you never have to dig through.

    Common questions

    Jumping spider care FAQ

    How often should I feed a jumping spider?

    It depends on age. Babies eat every other day and should always have a few live fruit flies around. Average-size jumpers eat twice a week, older juveniles once a week, and adults every 7–10 days. Interval feeding works really well — just set the interval per animal and the jumping spider feeding tracker keeps the schedule. Don't overfeed: overfed jumpers become balloon-shaped, fragile, and tend not to live as long.

    What do jumping spiders eat?

    Small jumpers eat fruit flies — Drosophila melanogaster first, then larger Drosophila hydei as they grow. Bigger jumpers eat crickets, red runner roaches (Shelfordella lateralis), small dubia roaches, mealworms, and small superworms. Their favorites are flies and crickets. Always use feeders smaller than the spider, and keep the diet varied — in nature they almost always catch something new.

    How often should I give a jumping spider water?

    Watering is the most important thing, especially for babies. The smallest jumpers should be offered water every other day; without it you can lose them in as little as 3 days. Average-size jumpers do well every 3rd day, and adults drink every 3–4 days. Just spray a little water on the enclosure wall or near their web — almost every jumper will come out and drink.

    How do I know my jumper is about to molt?

    A jumper in pre-molt stops eating and webs a lot — you'll see a thicker web, often sealed off on all sides. Turn on DND so it drops out of your feeding queue, remove any live prey, and keep offering a little water nearby every few days. Never leave a live cricket in with a molting jumper.

    How long after a molt should I wait to feed?

    Give the new exoskeleton time to harden — about 3 days for small jumpers and 5–7 days for older ones. Keep offering water every other day while they are fragile. In AlienKeeper you can set post-molt DND in one click right from the molt screen, then start again with easier prey when it ends.

    What does DND (Do Not Disturb) mode do?

    DND pauses feeding reminders for one animal. Use it when you spot pre-molt signs, during post-molt hardening, or any time a jumper should be left alone. When the DND period ends, it goes back into the care queue automatically.

    Can I track a lot of tiny jumpers at once?

    Yes. If you have many small jumpers, make one group card so you don't have to track every baby separately. If you have only a few, give each its own card and assign them to a space. The tracker sorts every animal by hunger level so the most overdue are always at the top.

    Can I use AlienKeeper just for photos?

    Yes. Every jumper gets a profile card with a photo timeline and basic info. If all you want is a place to keep photos and watch your jumpers grow, that works on its own — the tracking features are there whenever you want them.

    Does the app work for other animals too?

    Yes. The same tools work for tarantulas, other arachnids, reptiles, and insects, so you can keep all your animals in one place.

    This jumping spider husbandry guide will keep growing as we add features and learn more from keepers using the app. If you have a care workflow that should be in here, or a feature you'd like to see, the app has a feedback channel and we read everything that comes in.

    Longer, healthier lives for your jumpers

    Stay on top of watering and feeding intervals, never miss a pre-molt, and watch each jumper grow up in its own photo timeline. Keep your first jumpers free, and upgrade once your shelf outgrows it.

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    Care needs differ from one species to the next, and covering those specifics is beyond the scope of this guide — its focus is on how AlienKeeper helps with particular aspects of keeping. It is not a species-specific care sheet and does not contain everything you need to keep an animal successfully. Always research the requirements of your specific species before you start keeping it.