Breaking down insect stoichiometry into chitin-based and internal elemental traits: Patterns and correlates of continent-wide intraspecific variation in the largest European saproxylic beetle

Supporting dataset and methods for body sizes and concentrations of chemical elements measured in elytra and abdomens of Stag Beetles Lucanus cervus

“…Initially, we compared the masses of elytra and abdomens and the metal concentrations (in ppm d.w.) measured in both body parts across the studied populations. As we found substantial variation in both masses and ETs between elytra and abdomens (see Results in [1] ), the ETs of each of these two body parts were analysed separately.…”

“…We used a general linear model (in Statistica 12; Data Analysis Software System, Version 12.1. Tulsa: USA) to assess whether elytra and abdomen ETs were related to the masses of these body parts (see Results in [1] ). Owing to the large differences in ETs amongst populations, we repeated this analysis using the Spearman rank correlation coefficients to test the relationship between the sample mass and elytra, and abdomen metal concentrations within individual populations with sample sizes n > 10 ( Table 3 ).…”

“…1 ; Table 1 , Table 2 , Table 3 , Table 4 ; Appendix A) constitute the basis for the article by Orłowski et al. [1] . The dataset provides detailed information on: (1) the masses of elytra and abdomens across 28 local Stag Beetle Lucanus cervus (Photo 1) populations in Europe ( Fig.…”

Colour-assisted variation in elytral ICP-OES-based ionomics in an aposematic beetle

“…10,13,34 ), reveals high levels of As and Sb. Another recent study has shown that large amounts of As (up to 254.9 As ppm d.w.) bind with beetle elytra 12 . At the same time, whole-body concentrations of Sb in different invertebrate taxa were generally much lower (up to 3.26 Sb ppm d.w. 35 ) than in our study (up to 35.47 Sb ppm d.w.; Table 1).…”

“…from remains following a predation event, faeces, pellets, guano deposits, roadkill, museum collections or even palaeobiological material, so further studies employing such analytical material in the biomonitoring of environmental quality are both feasible highly desirable. Such studies permit an effective assessment of changes in environmental quality, with respect to both the historical context 37 and current land use 12 . Secondly, at the organism level, various analytical techniques are used to determine the content of chemical elements in biological samples: atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS and/or GFAAS), inductively coupled plasma with detection of optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES), and mass spectrometry (ICP-MS).…”