Species’ ranges are shifting in response to increasing temperature and decreasing oxygen in coastal oceans. Forecasting these shifts is limited by information on physiological oxygen thresholds and how they depend on temperature. Here, we adopt an ecophysiological metric, the metabolic index, and estimate its parameters from data collected on marine taxa using phylogenetic trait imputation. The metabolic index is the ratio of temperature-dependent rates of oxygen supply to basal oxygen demands. By applying a hierarchical phylogenetic model to a data set of 74 marine taxa that accounts for both taxonomic distance (from Linnean classification) and biases related to lab methods, we find that the critical oxygen pressure at a reference body size and temperature is remarkably consistent across taxa, ranging 2.9 to 4.9 kPa. In comparison, the estimated effect of temperature on the critical oxygen pressure was more variable among taxa.  These findings suggest that species-level differences in oxygen tolerance might be primarily related to differences in body size and preferred temperature. Further, this work provides data-informed distributions of parameters for species that lack experimental data to aid species distribution forecasting.

Data were collected via literature review or provided directly from authors.  Data were extracted digitally from figures when necessary.