Database of Grazing Metrics of Herbivorous Fishes of the Indo-Pacific (NCEI Accession 0259399)

The database described here consists of foraging metrics of herbivorous fishes (bite rate, bite area, bite volume, proportion of bites that leave grazing scars) extracted from relevant publications. All data were already publicly available either in the form of information reported in a publication or data were shared publicly via data repositories. Observations included in the database took place between 1985 and 2019 in tropical waters excluding locations in the Atlantic Ocean. Focal fish species were herbivores that are found in the nearshore waters of the United States Pacific Islands. The database also includes the body length of every fish, and information about sea surface temperature, time of day, and depth as available per measured bite rate. This referential tool compiles and standardizes grazing metrics across various studies of herbivorous fishes, as well as integrates sea surface temperature from satellite data for each study.