Global sea turtle epibiont database

This database serves to summarize over 100 years of sea turtle epibiont research. We conducted a two-tiered literature search to compile all records of sea turtle-epibiont interactions along with their associated metadata. A structured search was conducted in Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Sea Turtle Online Bibliography (Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research, University of Florida), then an unstructured literature search was conducted by reviewing the reference lists of all relevant publications and reports from the structured search. We included any peer-reviewed scientific article, thesis/dissertation, conference presentation, and official report that contained information on sea turtle epibiosis. From each applicable reference, we extracted data on all reported sea turtle-epibiont interactions according to the data categories and descriptions listed below (Table 1 in Robinson and Pfaller 2022; https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.844021). We constrained our database to only include records of sea turtle-epibiont interactions from (1) turtles surveyed in the wild, (2) animal epibionts (i.e., Kingdom Animalia), and (3) macro-epibionts (>1 mm). For the seven global sea turtle species, we identified 357 studies conducted between 1886 and 2024 that included a combined total of 1,952 sea turtle-epibiont interactions involving 374 unique epibiont taxa from 11 Phyla. 

Methods
Methods used to develop this global database are described in Robinson and Pfaller (2022) (https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.844021). We conducted a two-tiered literature search to compile all records of sea turtle-epibiont interactions along with their associated metadata. A structured search was conducted in Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Sea Turtle Online Bibliography (Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research, University of Florida), then an unstructured literature search was conducted by reviewing the reference lists of all relevant publications and reports from the structured search. We included any peer-reviewed scientific article, thesis/dissertation, conference presentation, and official report that contained information on sea turtle epibiosis. From each applicable reference, we extracted data on all reported sea turtle-epibiont interactions according to the data categories and descriptions listed below (Table 1 in Robinson and Pfaller 2022; doi link when available). We constrained our database to only include records of sea turtle-epibiont interactions from (1) turtles surveyed in the wild, (2) animal epibionts (i.e., Kingdom Animalia), and (3) macro-epibionts (>1 mm).