Size, growth, and density data for shallow‐water sea urchins from Mexico to the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, 1956–2016

Abstract

Size, growth, and density have been studied for North American Pacific coast sea urchins Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, S. droebachiensis, S. polyacanthus, Mesocentrotus (Strongylocentrotus) franciscanus, Lytechinus pictus, Centrostephanus coronatus, and Arbacia stellata by various workers at diverse sites and for varying lengths of time from 1956 to present. Numerous peer-reviewed publications have used some of these data but some data have appeared only in graduate theses or the gray literature. There also are data that have never appeared outside original data sheets. Motivation for studies has included fisheries management and environmental monitoring of sewer and power plant outfalls as well as changes associated with disease epidemics. Studies also have focused on kelp restoration, community effects of sea otters, basic sea urchin biology, and monitoring. The data sets presented here are a historical record of size, density, and growth for a common group of marine invertebrates in intertidal and nearshore environments that can be used to test hypotheses concerning future changes associated with fisheries practices, shifts of predator distributions, climate and ecosystem changes, and ocean acidification along the Pacific Coast of North America and islands of the north Pacific. No copyright restrictions apply. Please credit this paper when using the data.

Sea otter population collapse in southwest Alaska: assessing ecological covariates, consequences, and causal factors

“…We augmented this data set with historical data from Bering Island and the Aleutian archipelago collected prior to 2005 (Estes & Duggins 1995, Estes et al 1998, in order to evaluate temporal trends at index Islands and to contrast mean urchin biomass densities between populations in predecline, declining, and postdecline states. We note that all urchin data included in this analysis have been previously published in a rangewide summary of urchin life history parameters (Ebert et al 2018).…”

“…Additional supporting information may be found online at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecm.1472/full OPEN RESEARCH All data used for analyses presented here are available for download at publicly available data repositories, including survey data on population trends, distribution, and reproductive rates (Kenner et al 2021); carcass recovery rates (Kloecker & Monson 2020; body size and condition (Monson et al 2021); diet and energy recovery rates (Kloecker & Monson 2017); urchin abundance (Ebert et al 2018); health metrics and blood chemistry (Kenner et al 2021); and gene transcription data (Bowen et al 2017). Contaminant data from mussels and urchins are available in Jessup et al (2010Jessup et al ( , 2021.…”

Retelling the History of the Red Sea Urchin Fishery in Mexico

“…Red sea urchins (Mesocentrotus franciscanus) are one of the must-studied echinoderms in the Northeaster Pacific coast, from Mexico to Alaska (Ebert et al, 2018). As a fishery, it has a long harvest and management history along the Pacific coast (Pfister and Bradbury, 1996;Andrew et al, 2002).…”

Hunter-gatherers subsistence and impact on fauna in the Islands of Four Mountains, Eastern Aleutians, Alaska, over 3000 yr

“…Sea urchin remains from archaeological sites on Adak, Buldir, and Shemya islands were identified as S. polyacanthus (Antipushina and Pakhnevich, 2010). This species is common in the littoral zone of Amchitka Island (O’Clair, 1977), but is difficult to distinguish from S. droebachiensis (Ebert et al, 2018).…”