Question: Caring for Slings (barn funnel weaver & grass spider)

[Angelala]

Hey all!

I have been keeping a female tegenaria domestica & a female grass spider (Ontario, Canada).

My TD laid eggs 2 weeks ago, and my grass spider just yesterday. I need advice about caring for their slings:

Some have told me to leave the slings in with mom for awhile, until mom starts eating them, and then to move them to their own enclosure, leaving them in there until they start eating each other, so as to end up with the "strongest" slings only.

I am just wondering if this is the correct thing to do? Have any of you raised True Spider slings, and if so can you share your experiences/advice?

If the above technique is true, how long approx. do you leave them together? How do you know when to separate?

Also, feeding: how do you feed such small slings? Toss in a leg from a cricket or something for them to scavenge from?

And I'm assuming for water you want to lightly mist so they don't get caught in water bubbles?

This is my first experience / attempt raising slings, so any advice, instruction, no matter how "obvious" it may seem, would be greatly appreciated!

(Also any things you did that you wish you hadn't done - basically I'm hoping to learn lots from your experiences!)

Thanks so much!

 

[The wolf]

With agelenid sacs I tend to separate the sac from the mum and put it in a separate setup,they will clump initially and you can try feeding them pre killed but usually they don't eat,once they disperse you can let them canabalise until u have the strongest few of just release a ton and keep a couple,feed them flightless fruit flys and springtails once separated

 

[WildSpider]

I've tried a few different ways but what I'm kind of going with currently is to separate them from the mom when they start to separate themselves by wandering off. I figure this is when they feel they're ready to be separated. I actually keep mine a building where I don't mind spiders being loose so I just have little air holes for the mom that are actually big enough for the babies to escape through. When they start exiting the enclosure, I just take a couple that are still in there for myself. If you want to keep them all though, I bet you could put your container with the mom and the babies inside a larger container and let the babies wander into that (instead of being loose). I actually just separate the slings from each other once they start to wander since, again, that's when they want to separate themselves so I would just move them straight from the larger container (after they've wandered into there) to their own enclosures.

Depending on the species, I've had luck throwing in dead prey and sometimes not. It seems to me, I didn't have much luck with grass spider slings eating dead prey and I haven't kept Tegenaria domestica yet. What I did just today for my Eratigena atrica slings was I gave them some springtails like The wolf mentioned. That seemed to work well. Fruit flies might be another option as long as the slings aren't too small for them. As you've probably noticed, grass spiders are pretty good at taking down prey so I'm guessing they could handle fruit flies.