Morphological Characteristics of Oysters from Predator Experiments at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, AL, May-July 2019

These data include oyster morphological characteristics after oysters were settled onto shells and either exposed to predator cues (caged blue crabs) or controls of no cues. Oysters were nursed in a flow-through seawater system at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab for two months starting in late May 2019. Afterward, subsets of oysters were assessed for shell strength, size, and dry weight using a Kistler force sensor and drying oven.

Predators often produce nonconsumptive effects (NCEs) in their prey in the form of behavioral or morphological changes. Such changes often have larger or equal consequences for population dynamics as the predator directly consumes individual prey. However, it is not well understood how predators feeding across multiple trophic levels cause cascading NCEs that interact across prey trophic levels or how the prey survival benefits from these interactions change across contexts. These data help demonstrate how NCEs can influence population dynamics across space and quantify the strength of these context-dependent interactions.

Data were collected by Drs. Benjamin Belgrad, Lee Smee, and Marc Weissburg from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and Georgia Institute of Technology.