Evolutionary biologists have long been interested in the macroevolutionary consequences of various selection pressures, yet physiological responses to selection across deep time are not well understood. In this paper, we investigate how a physiologically relevant morphological trait, surface area to volume ratio (SA:V) of lungless salamanders, has evolved across broad regional and climatic variation. SA:V directly impacts an organisms’ ability to retain water, leading to the expectation that smaller SA:Vs would be advantageous in arid, water‐limited environments. To explore the macroevolutionary patterns of SA:V, we first develop an accurate method for estimating SA:V from linear measurements. Next, we investigate the macroevolutionary patterns of SA:V across 257 salamander species, revealing that higher SA:Vs phylogenetically correlate with warmer, wetter climates. We also observe higher SA:V disparity and rate of evolution in tropical species, mirrored by higher climatic disparity in available and occupied tropical habitats. Taken together, these results suggest that the tropics have provided a wider range of warmer, wetter climates for salamanders to exploit, thereby relaxing desiccation pressures on SA:V. Overall, this paper provides an accurate, efficient method for quantifying salamander SA:V, allowing us to demonstrate the power of physiological selection pressures in influencing the macroevolution of morphology.

Identifying the historical processes that drive microhabitat transitions across deep time is of great interest to evolutionary biologists. Morphological variation can often reveal such mechanisms, but in clades with high microhabitat diversity and no concomitant morphological specialization, the factors influencing animal transitions across microhabitats are more difficult to identify. Lungless salamanders (family: Plethodontidae) have transitioned into and out of the arboreal microhabitat many times throughout their evolutionary history without substantial morphological specialization. In this study, we explore the relationship between microhabitat use and broad-scale climatic patterns across species’ ranges to test the role of climate in determining the availability of the arboreal microhabitat. Using phylogenetic comparative methods, we reveal that arboreal species live in warmer, lower elevation regions than terrestrial species. We also employ ecological niche modeling as a complementary approach, quantifying species-level pairwise comparisons of niche overlap. The results of this approach demonstrate that arboreal species on average display more niche overlap with other arboreal species than with terrestrial species after accounting for non-independence of niche model pairs caused by geographic and phylogenetic distances. Our results suggest that occupation of the arboreal microhabitat by salamanders may only be possible in sufficiently warm, low elevation conditions. More broadly, this study indicates that the impact of micro-environmental conditions on temporary microhabitat use, as demonstrated by small-scale ecological studies, may scale up dramatically to shape macroevolutionary patterns.

Sponges are animals that inhabit many aquatic environments while filtering small particles and ejecting metabolic wastes. They are composed of cells in a bulk extracellular matrix, often with an embedded scaffolding of stiff, siliceous spicules. We hypothesize that the mechanical response of this heterogeneous tissue to hydrodynamic flow influences cell proliferation in a manner that generates the body of a sponge. Towards a more complete picture of the emergence of sponge morphology, we dissected a set of species and subjected discs of living tissue to physiological shear and uniaxial deformations on a rheometer. Various species exhibited rheological properties such as anisotropic elasticity, shear softening and compression stiffening, negative normal stress, and non-monotonic dissipation as a function of both shear strain and frequency. Erect sponges possessed aligned, spicule-reinforced fibres which endowed three times greater stiffness axially compared with orthogonally. By contrast, tissue taken from shorter sponges was more isotropic but time-dependent, suggesting higher flow sensitivity in these compared with erect forms. We explore ecological and physiological implications of our results and speculate about flow-induced mechanical signalling in sponge cells.