Reassessing the evolutionary relationships of tropical wandering spiders using phylogenomics: A UCE-based phylogeny of Ctenidae (Araneae) with the discovery of a new lycosoid family.

Abstract

Tropical wandering spiders (Ctenidae) are a diverse family of cursorial predators whose species richness peaks in the tropics. The phylogeny of Ctenidae has been examined using morphology and Sanger-based sequencing data, but these studies have been limited by taxon sampling and have often recovered low branch support for many intrafamilial phylogenetic relationships. Herein, we present the most extensive phylogenetic sampling of this family using genome-scale data, leveraging museum collections of all ctenid subfamilies from across the world. We obtained a well-resolved phylogeny of Ctenidae, with the majority of nodes showing maximal nodal support and topological congruence across different phylogenetic analyses. For the first time, we show with high support that Ancylometes is not within Ctenidae but is the sister lineage to all the remaining lycosoid families. Therefore, we propose Ancylometidae as a new family. We assess the phylogenetic position of Ctenidae within Lycosoidea using a variety of phylogenetic methods and tests, demonstrating that the previously proposed position of Ctenidae as the sister clade of Psechridae, based on phylotranscriptomic analyses, lacks phylogenetic support. As a new finding, this study shows that the subfamily Acantheinae, as currently delimited, is polyphyletic. Therefore, we erect the new subfamily Enoplocteninae to accommodate the Neotropical genera Enoploctenus, Chococtenus, and Phymatoctenus. Our phylogenomic results using UCE data resolve the position of several problematic genera (e.g., Califorctenus and Acantheis) and add support to other parts of the tree that received low support in the most recent Sanger-based phylogeny. We discuss some of the putative morphological synapomorphies of the main ctenid lineages within the phylogenetic framework provided by the molecular phylogenetic results of this study.