Dataset: Metamorphic competence of Dendraster excentricus larvae under three experimental treatment conditions

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

Study summary:
In this study of food limitation in the sand dollar Dendraster excentricus, 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 >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.