Fig. 1

Venom production is metabolically expensive. a Changes in oxygen consumption following fishing line treatment measured by closed-chamber respirometry (Additional file 1: Data S1). The error bars represent standard errors. b Percentage differences of expression for genes encoding toxins (solid lines) and nematocyst structural proteins (dashed lines) following fishing line treatment. c Absolute differences of expression for toxin-coding genes (Nv1, Nematolysin_1b, NveSKT1), nematocyst structural protein NCol3 (dashed line), stress response (Catalase), and housekeeping (HKG4 and HKG5) genes following fishing line treatment. Noticeably, Nv1, NveSkT1b, and Nematolysin 1b are the genes with the largest increase in expression in absolute units. d Gene expression at the 3-h time point represented as a percentage chart. The toxins Nv1, NveSkT1b, and Nematolysin 1b are contributing to a total of 77% of the transcripts among all the genes measured in this experiment. In b, c, and d, gene expression is represented as normalized fluorescence units measured by nCounter technology (Additional file 1: Data S2); the error bars represent standard deviations