Fecundity increase supports adaptive radiation hypothesis in spider web evolution

Identifying the mechanisms driving adaptive radiations is key to explaining the diversity of life. The extreme reliance of spiders upon silk for survival provides an exceptional system in which to link patterns of diversification to adaptive changes in silk use. Most of the world's 41,000 species of spiders belong to two apical lineages of spiders that exhibit quite different silk ecologies, distinct from their ancestors. Orb spiders spin highly stereotyped webs that are suspended in air and utilize a chemical glue to make them adhesive. RTA clade spiders mostly abandoned silk capture webs altogether. We recently proposed that these two clades present very different evolutionary routes of achieving the same key innovation-escape from the constraints imposed by spinning webs that contain a relatively costly type of physically adhesive cribellate silk. Here, we test the prediction that orb and RTA clade spiders are not only more diverse, but also have higher fecundity than other spiders. We show that RTA clade spiders average 23% higher fecundity and orb spiders average 123% higher fecundity than their ancestors. This supports a functional link between the adaptive escape from cribellate silk and increased resource allocation to reproduction in spiders.