Optimising fertilisation kinetics models for broadcast spawning corals in the genus Acropora

This dataset contains information about fine-scale gamete properties of spawning corals on the Great Barrier Reef. This data was collected and used to optimise fertilisation kinetics models for spawning corals. Sperm swimming speed assays were conducted for A. cf. kenti (previously A. “Maggie” tenuis) to gather species-specific metrics for the analysis. Sperm samples were examined at 40x magnification with phase contrast using a Zeiss Primostar 3 trinocular compound light microscope with a CMOS 8.3 MP camera attachment. Videos of sperm were taken using the ImageView software (YSCTechnologies 2024) at 60 frames per second (FPS) for 3 seconds. Three videos were taken per slide at three different locations around the slide, and this was repeated five times for each replicate cross. Sperm swimming was analysed with a point tracking method using the DLTdv8a app (Hedrick 2008) in Matlab. Initial (vi) and final (vf) velocity parameters were used to calculate the average velocity (vavg) of all motile sperm in each video. Some videos were omitted due to poor quality or lack of visible or motile sperm for long enough durations (>2 sec). A total of 82 total sperm tracks were quantified across 35 videos.