Subject	Marine Biology
Specific subject area	In-land in-lab breeding of colonial ascidians in recirculating artificial seawater
Type of data	Table
How data were acquired	The data was acquired using an Apex controller (Neptune Systems, US) with five temperature sensors, two salinity sensors, one pH sensor and one ORP sensor; manually using water quality kits (Tropic Marin, DE) for pH, NH4+, NO2−, NO3−, PO43− and a refractometer (Red Sea, US) for salinity; and manually by visual inspection when handling the colonies for the lineages, the differential feeding and the microbiota experiments.
Data format	Raw (CSV text file)
Parameters for data collection	All available sensor readings were included in the dataset as well as all manual measurements over a monitoring duration of 3 years. Water quality parameters were gradually included in the dataset over the duration of the monitoring.
Description of data collection	Sensor readings were acquired automatically ever 200 s, water quality and feeding data were measured weekly, lineaging was acquired whenever colonies were manipulated, microbiota data was acquired daily for five consecutive days and on day 7.
Data source location	Institution: Department of Biology, University of Fribourg City/Town/Region: Fribourg/Fribourg Country: Switzerland Latitude and longitude (and GPS coordinates, if possible) for collected samples/data: 46.7932731,7.1556777
Data accessibility	With the article
Related research article	M.K. Wawrzyniak, L.A. Matas Serrato, S. Blanchoud, Artificial seawater based long-term culture of colonial ascidians, Developmental Biology. 480, pp. 91–104, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2021.08.005.