DOI: 10.5061/dryad.tb2rbp015
title: Building behaviour does not drive rates of phenotypic evolution in spiders

description: This data set contains raw data tables, scripts and supplemental figures
 supporting the article Wolff et al. (2021, PNAS 118: e2102693118). In our
 study we assembled morphometric and ecological trait data of spiders from
 literature and de novo measurements and observations and used this data to
 infer the rates of morphological change over deep time in relation to web
 building behaviour.
description: We built a database of morphometric and ecological data on a
 representative taxon sample of the order Araneae. We followed the taxon
 sample of the Araneae Tree of Life project (AToL)
 <sup>2</sup>, which contains 932 terminals of all at that time
 valid families except Synaphridae (corresponds to ~2% of described
 species). This sample is representative of the phylogenetic and
 morphological diversity of spiders. AToL terminals that were not
 identified to species level and for which no image material was available
 were replaced with described species with a type locality close to the
 collection site (26.3% of the used sample; details in main article
 <sup>1</sup>). 11% of the AToL terminals were omitted as there
 was not enough information to determine a suitable replacement, resulting
 in a total of 828 included species. The morphological
 data were assembled by extracting data from taxonomic descriptions using
 the WSC database <sup>3</sup>, and measurements on images
 published in articles or online repositories (including Morphbank ::
 Biological Imaging, http://www.morphbank.net, where images of AToL
 specimens were deposited), with one to seven sources combined per species
 (for statistics of used sources see main article <sup>1</sup>,
 and for a list see file “Dataset_morphometric-data-raw.xlxs”). As many
 spiders exhibit a significant sexual dimorphism, only data of adult
 females were used. We included only general traits, i.e., ones that were
 assumed to be affected by more than one niche property. For instance, body
 shape may be under selection from a mix of abiotic (e.g., temperature and
 microhabitat structure) and biotic (e.g., prey spectrum and predation)
 factors. The following measurements were recorded: body length;
 cephalothorax (prosoma) length; cephalothorax width; height of
 cephalothorax (carapace); length of mouth parts (i.e. cheliceral base
 segment); diameter of each eye type; length of front leg (excl. coxa,
 trochanter and pretarsus). From these the following six traits were
 calculated: (1) body size (=body length); (2) body shape (cephalothorax
 width / cephalothorax length); (3) relative cephalothorax height
 (cephalothorax height / (cephalothorax length + width)); (4) size of mouth
 parts (paturon length / cephalothorax height); (5) eye size (sum of
 diameters of all eye types / cephalothorax width); (6) relative leg length
 (length of front leg / cephalothorax width). From each trait the species
 mean was calculated (i.e., from the 1-7 data sources, for details see main
 article <sup>1</sup> and file
 “Dataset_morphometric-data-raw.xlsx”) and log-transformed, to build the
 species matrix for further analysis (file
 “Dataset_combined-trait-matrix.csv”). The ecological
 data matrix was built by assessing the literature on same or closely
 related species, and in few cases complemented by personal observations
 (for details, see notes in file “Dataset_ecological-data-raw.xlsx”). We
 used a binary coded category: state 0, non-builder; state 1, builder. We
 defined a species as a ‘builder’ (1), if individuals spend most of their
 life in a self-constructed web or burrow, i.e. foraging and reproduction
 takes place on, in or from the artefact, and the artefact aids in prey
 capture, signalling and/or defence. In contrast, a ‘non-builder’ (0) does
 not build a capture web or a burrow, it may build a retreat, which,
 however, is only used in periods of inactivity and does not aid in prey
 capture.  Method References<br>
 <sup>1</sup>    Wolff, J. O., Wierucka, K., Uhl, G., &
 Herberstein, M. E. Building behavior does not drive rates of phenotypic
 evolution in spiders. <em>Proc Natl Acad Sci</em> 118,
 e2102693118 (2021).<br> <sup>2</sup>     Wheeler, W. C.
 et al. The spider tree of life: phylogeny of Araneae based on target‐gene
 analyses from an extensive taxon sampling. <em>Cladistics
 </em>33, 574-616 (2017).<br> <sup>3</sup>  
  Nentwig, W., Gloor, D. & Kropf, C. Taxonomic database: Spider
 taxonomists catch data on web. <em>Nat Cell Biol</em> 528, 479
 (2015).
description: For a description of files and data please refer to the README
 file.