Is phenotypic evolution affected by spiders’ construction behaviors?

What happens when organisms actively modify their environment? Clarifying the role of construction behavior on a macroevolutionary scale is crucial to interpreting phenotypic evolution. Spiders, an extremely successful group of animals exhibiting a wide variety of functional, morphological, and behavioral diversity, are ideal candidates to test whether animal behaviors are related to their phenotypic evolution. Herein, we reconstructed the phylogenomic relationships of 303 spiders covering 105 families with 99 newly developed molecular markers that universally apply across Araneae, and explicitly tested the potential link between construction behavior and somatic evolution based on extensive morphological data from 3,342 extant species and 682 fossil species. Our dated molecular phylogeny provides the backbone for analyses, revealing the behavioral and ecological processes behind these spiders’ morphological adaptations. Evolutionary model analyses showed the artifacts constructed by sp...