Across ecosystems, animals face expanding human populations, transportation networks, and urbanization that threaten their survival. Traditional strategies for conservation often hinge on understanding an animal’s habitat and population structure, with less attention is paid to the animal’s “habit”, their way of being in and sensing the world. However, recent appeals to consider the sensory ecology - the way organisms acquire, process, and share information - of species suggest transitioning away from questions like “What do these organisms eat?” and “Who eats them?” toward questions that ask, “In what ways do these animals find food or avoid being eaten?” For many animals, the ubiquitous answer to questions concerning the mechanism for finding food or mates, avoiding predators, choosing suitable habitats, or communicating with conspecifics is “substrate-borne sound”.Substrate-borne bioacoustics is the subset of bioacoustics that concerns the exchange of information via mechanical waves through substrates such as rock, soil, litter, or plant material. It likely long precedes airborne communication via pressure waves in evolutionary time and is used by the vast majority of terrestrial animals - over 95% of all species. Despite this, substrate-borne bioacoustics have been largely ignored in broad acoustic fields of study. For example, animals sensitive to substrate-borne sounds were long excluded from decades of research attempting to explain the diversity of acoustics across taxa (Chapter 2) and mostly left out of research investigating the impacts of anthropogenic noise on animal behavior (Chapter 3). In this dissertation, my colleagues and I do our best to address these exclusions and examine the impacts of substrate-borne anthropogenic noise on a single species; the mason spider (Castianeira sp.) (Chapters 4 & 5). We found that the exclusion of substrate-borne bioacoustics from major fields of study skewed biophysical explanations of acoustic diversity across taxa and may limit understandings of the reach of anthropogenic noise. In addition, when we narrowed our focus to a single invertebrate species, we found that the impact of substrate-borne anthropogenic noise has profound effects on invertebrate behavior. Our research suggests that understanding substrate-borne bioacoustics and substrate-borne anthropogenic noise may be critically important in conserving species, communities, and ultimately, biodiversity