Polyp size predicts metabolic rates across diverse tropical coral species

As climate change accelerates, characterizing metabolic scaling in corals is essential to forecasting which species are most physiologically vulnerable to environmental shifts. While body size is a fundamental driver of metabolism, it remains unclear whether colonial organisms such as corals conform to universal scaling laws. We characterized the relationship between polyp morphological traits and aerobic metabolism across 13 diverse reef-building coral species from the Red Sea. We measured dark respiration rates and paired them with precise polyp-level morphological traits, including biovolume, surface area, and corallite width. This dataset consists of two primary components: (1) empirical physiological and morphological measurements we collected from 156 coral fragments across a wide range of polyp sizes, and (2) a predictive expansion where we applied our derived scaling models to 727 coral species using the Coral Trait Database. We found that coral respiration scales isometrically ..., , # Data from: Polyp size predicts metabolic rates across diverse tropical coral species Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.cjsxksnn2](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cjsxksnn2) ## Description of the data and file structure As climate change accelerates, characterizing metabolic scaling in corals is essential to forecasting which species are most physiologically vulnerable to environmental shifts. While body size is a fundamental driver of metabolism, it remains unclear whether colonial organisms such as corals conform to universal scaling laws. We characterized the relationship between polyp morphological traits and aerobic metabolism across 13 diverse reef-building coral species from the Red Sea. We measured dark respiration rates and paired them with polyp-level morphological traits, including biovolume, surface area, and corallite width. This dataset consists of two primary components: 1. Empirical physiological and morphological measurements collected from 156 coral fragments across a wi..., , , **Changes after Apr 22, 2026:**  As requested by the journal, the morphological dataset downloaded from the Coral Trait Database containing the maximum and minimum corallite width values used in the analyses and predictive modeling of this study has been included as Supplementary Data 2. The predictions generated using our scaling models are now provided as Supplementary Data 3.