Interspecific allometric scaling in eDNA production among Northwestern Atlantic bony fishes reflects physiological allometric scaling

Relating environmental DNA (eDNA) signal strength to organism abundance requires a fundamental understanding of eDNA production. A number of studies have demonstrated that eDNA production may scale allometrically – that is, larger organisms tend to exhibit lower mass-specific eDNA production rates, likely due to allometric scaling in key processes related to eDNA production (e.g. surface area, excretion/egestion). While most previous studies have examined intra-specific allometry, physiological rates and organism surface area also scale allometrically across species. We therefore hypothesize that eDNA production will similarly exhibit inter-specific allometric scaling. To evaluate this hypothesis, we reanalyzed previously published eDNA data from Stoeckle et al. (2021) which compared metabarcoding read count to organism count and biomass data obtained from trawl surveys off the New Jersey coast. Using a Bayesian model we empirically estimated the value of the allometric scaling coeffici..., This is a curated dataset obtained from:
Stoeckle, M.Y., Adolf, J., Charlop-powers, Z., Dunton, K.J., Hinks, G., and Vanmorter, S.M. 2021. Trawl and eDNA assessment of marine fish diversity, seasonality, and relative abundance in coastal New Jersey, USA. ICES J. Mar. Sci. 78(1): 293–304. doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsaa225.
We separated Chondrichtyan and Osteichthyan species into separate datasets, including only species which were detected using eDNA. Values of 0.001 were added to 'zeroes' for abundance data, due to the inclusion of a heteroscedastic residual error term in some of the models.,