Data from: Evaluating the influences of temperature, primary production, and evolutionary history on bivalve growth rates

Organismal metabolic rates reflect the interaction of environmental and
physiological factors. Thus, calcifying organisms that record growth
history can provide insight into both their own physiology and life
history and the ancient environments in which they lived. However,
interpreting them requires understanding which environmental factors have
the greatest influence on growth rate, and to what extent evolutionary
history constrains growth rates across lineages. We integrated satellite
measurements of sea surface temperature and chlorophyll-a concentration
with a database of growth coefficients, body sizes, and lifespans for 692
populations of living marine bivalves in 195 species, set within the
context of a new maximum likelihood phylogeny of bivalves. We find that
environmental predictors overall explain only a small proportion of
variation in growth coefficient across all species; temperature is a
better predictor of growth coefficient than food supply, and growth
coefficient is somewhat more variable at higher summer temperature. Growth
coefficients exhibit moderate phylogenetic signal and taxonomic membership
is a stronger predictor of growth coefficient than any environmental
predictor, but phylogenetic inertia cannot fully explain the disjunction
between our findings and the extensive body of work demonstrating strong
environmental control on growth rates within taxa. Accounting for
evolutionary history is critical when considering shells as historical
archives. The weak relationship between variation in food supply and
variation in growth coefficient in our dataset is inconsistent with the
hypothesis that the increase in mean body size through the Phanerozoic was
driven by increasing productivity enabling faster growth rates.