Spiders did not repeatedly gain, but repeatedly lost, foraging webs.

ABSTRACT: Much genomic-scale, especially transcriptomic, data on spider phylogeny has accumulated in the last few years. These data have recently been used to investigate the diverse architectures and the origin of spider webs, concluding that the ancestral spider spun no foraging web, that spider webs evolved de novo 10-14 times, and that the orb web evolved at least three times. These findings in fact result from a particular phylogenetic character coding strategy, specifically coding the absence of webs as logically equivalent, and homologous to, 10 other observable (i.e., not absent) web architectures. "Absence" of webs should be regarded as inapplicable data. To be analyzed properly by character optimization algorithms, it should be coded as "?" because these codes-or their equiva

SUBMITTER: Coddington JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6451839 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature