The Survivors

Now that it is winter time, it has been a lot harder to find food for all the spiders to eat. Because of the overpopulation, many of the baby spiders have died and the ones remaining are struggling to survive.
A black garden spider that I have in my bottle habitat is also preying on the baby spiders, eating them for a nice snack. The garden spider and the environment limits of scarce food are controlling the population of the spiders.
Its cool to see how it is all working out. There are now 11 baby spiders left out of the original 38. The mom spider is also still alive. All together there is probably around 40 spiders including the garden spider. The picture is of the mom spider, up at the top of the bottle.

Update

Hey, so haven't had an update in awhile now, so here goes. The tiny baby spiders for awhile did nothing but watch the mother spider and see how she caught the flies I fed her. They then made a ring around her and watched intently as she wrapped up the prey and fled to the bottom of the bottle to eat her food in peace. A few days after that, the tiny spiders molted and I then realized that they could not do much but hang around because they were waiting to molt into better bodies. Their new bodies were more to the proportion of what a normal daddy long leg spider would look like and made it easier for them to move swiftly around the huge web with their longer legs. After the spiders molted, they all became very territorial and aggressive towards each other. They chased each other around to keep their small territory to themselves. They then molted another time getting even a bit bigger but still tiny in comparison to their mom.

The mom during this time has been motherly to her babies but not attached. She shows no signs of aggression towards her little ones but stays out of the way not moving around much.

The Pictures show what the little spiders look like now. Two of them like to hang around on the bottom of the lid. The other spiders are still hard to see through the bottle's surface.