We conducted a six-month aquarium experiment with three life stages of Caryophyllia huinayensis to study their physiological response (survival, somatic growth, calcification and respiration) to the interactive effects of aragonite saturation (0.8 and 2.5), temperature (11 and 15 °C) and food availability (8 and 87 μg C/L). The fully crossed factorial design of this experiment with the three parameters resulted in eight treatments. We measured the calcification and respiration rates as well as the health status of the corals after one, three and six months. The survival rate was deteremined every month, the change in tissue covered surface area was measured between the beginning and end of the experiment and prey capture rates were determined after five months. During the whole experiment, the temperature was measured every 15 minutes with TidbiT temperature loggers and additional water parameters (temperature, salinity, pH and oxygen concentration) were measured daily. We took waters samples (total alkalinity and nutrients) once a week and used TA and pH (total scale) to calculate the carbonate chemistry using the programme CO2sys.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2022) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI). The date of carbonate chemistry calculation by seacarb is 2023-10-13.