Long-term monitoring data logs of a recirculating artificial seawater based colonial ascidian aquaculture

Abstract

This article presents and describes data related to the monitoring of our in-land in-lab marine recirculating artificial seawater husbandry system for breeding colonial ascidians [1] over a timespan of three years. These datasets were collected both automatically as well as manually, and include abiotic parameters (salinity, pH, temperature, ORP), concentrations of noxious ions (NH4+, NO2−, NO3−, PO43−), the full lineaging of the colonies developing in the aquaculture setup, animal countings under four different feeding diets and animal survival in artificial seawater containing six different microbiota. Our aquaculture was used to breed two species of model colonial ascidians, Botrylloides diegensis [2,3] and Botryllus schlosseri [4]. All the datasets are provided as raw CSV files together with an analysis script to reproduce the figures of our accompanying research article [1]. These extensive datasets give detailed insights into the impact of culturing conditions on the breeding of colonial ascidians and could be used to investigate this intricate relationship.

Keywords

• Colonial ascidians
• Recirculating artificial seawater
• In-land aquaculture
• Water quality
• Breeding monitoring
• Marine model organism