Data and analysis from: Body mass, temperature, and depth shape the maximum intrinsic rate of population increase in sharks and rays

An important challenge in ecology is to understand variation in species’
maximum intrinsic rate of population increase, ????, not least because
???? underpins our understanding of the limits of fishing, recovery
potential, and ultimately extinction risk. Across many vertebrate species,
terrestrial and aquatic, body mass and environmental temperature are
important correlates of ????. In sharks and rays, specifically, ???? is
known be lower in larger species, but also in deep-sea ones. We use an
information-theoretic approach that accounts for phylogenetic relatedness
to evaluate the relative importance of body mass, temperature and depth on
????. We show that both temperature and depth have separate effects on
shark and ray ???? estimates, such that species living in deeper waters
have lower ????. Furthermore, temperature also correlates with changes in
the mass scaling coefficient, suggesting that as body size increases,
decreases in ???? are much steeper for species in warmer waters. These
findings suggest that there are (as-yet understood) depth-related
processes that limit the maximum rate at which populations can grow in
deep sea sharks and rays. While the deep ocean is associated with colder
temperatures, other factors that are independent of temperature, such as
food availability and physiological constraints, may influence the low
???? observed in deep sea sharks and rays. Our study lays the foundation
for predicting the intrinsic limit of fishing, recovery potential, and
extinction risk species based on easily accessible environmental
information such as temperature and depth, particularly for data-poor
species. This repository contains the data and a minimum working example
of the model-fitting process used for the article "Body mass,
temperature, and depth shape productivity in sharks and rays", which
is currently in press at Ecology and Evolution.