Data from: 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 with polyp biovolume and shows slight positive allometry
with surface area, with both scaling exponents (b) remaining close to 1.
The data values provided include raw and blanked respiration rates (μmol
O2​ polyp−1 h−1), individual polyp biovolume (mm3), and surface area
(mm2). Our results indicate that, unlike many other organisms, coral polyp
metabolism is directly proportional to size rather than following the
¾-power rule. Our findings challenge the generality of universal metabolic
rules in colonial marine invertebrates and provide a trait-based framework
for future large-scale metabolic estimations.