Data from: Idiosyncratic species effects confound size-based predictions of responses to climate change

Understanding and predicting the consequences of warming for complex
ecosystems and indeed individual species remains a major ecological
challenge. Here, we investigated the effect of increased seawater
temperatures on the metabolic and consumption rates of five distinct
marine species. The experimental species reflected different trophic
positions within a typical benthic East Atlantic food web, and included a
herbivorous gastropod, a scavenging decapod, a predatory echinoderm, a
decapod and a benthic-feeding fish. We examined the metabolism–body mass
and consumption–body mass scaling for each species, and assessed changes
in their consumption efficiencies. Our results indicate that body mass and
temperature effects on metabolism were inconsistent across species and
that some species were unable to meet metabolic demand at higher
temperatures, thus highlighting the vulnerability of individual species to
warming. While body size explains a large proportion of the variation in
species' physiological responses to warming, it is clear that
idiosyncratic species responses, irrespective of body size, complicate
predictions of population and ecosystem level response to future scenarios
of climate change.