Metamorphic competence of Dendraster excentricus larvae under three experimental treatment conditions

<p>This dataset contains information on metamorphic competence of <em>Dendraster excentricus</em> larvae exposed to three treatment conditions during larval food limitation experiments.</p>

<p><strong>Study summary:</strong><br />
In this study of food limitation in the sand dollar&nbsp;<em>Dendraster excentricus</em>, we attempted to constrain estimates of the chl a boundary between food-limited and food-unlimited growth by carrying out experiments in nearshore coastal waters of southern California, which frequently have chl a levels &gt;2 ugL-1. We reared larvae in the laboratory in natural seawater collected from the field, as well as in reduced and supplemented food treatments created from this natural seawater. To supplement this investigator-generated variation in food level, we repeated this experiment six times over the course of two years to take advantage of temporal variation in chl a. Within experiments, we assessed whether larvae were food limited by looking both for evidence of food-level induced phenotypic plasticity, and by generating population-level estimates of time to metamorphic competence.</p>

<p>本数据集收录了幼虫食物限制实验中，暴露于三种处理条件下的<em>偏心沙钱（Dendraster excentricus）</em>幼虫的变态感受态相关信息。</p><p><strong>研究概述：</strong><br />本研究以沙钱（Dendraster excentricus）为对象开展食物限制相关实验，旨在限定食物限制生长与无食物限制生长之间的叶绿素a（chl a）浓度阈值。实验在南加州近岸海域开展，该海域的叶绿素a浓度常高于2 μg·L⁻¹。我们使用野外采集的天然海水在实验室中培育幼虫，并基于该天然海水构建了食物水平降低与食物添加的两组处理。为拓展我们通过实验构建的食物水平变异范围，我们在两年内重复开展了6次实验，以利用叶绿素a浓度的时间异质性。在各次实验中，我们通过两种途径评估幼虫是否处于食物限制状态：一是检测食物水平诱导的表型可塑性证据，二是计算种群达到变态感受态的时间估计值。</p>