Dataset: Measurements on each beaker’s initial chl a concentration from larval food limitation experiments conducted on the sand dollar Dendraster excentricus

This dataset contains measurements on each beaker’s initial chl a concentration.

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.