The influence of sample distribution on growth model output for a highly-exploited marine fish, the Gulf Corvina (Cynoscion othonopterus).

ABSTRACT: Estimating the growth of fishes is critical to understanding their life history and conducting fisheries assessments. It is imperative to sufficiently sample each size and age class of fishes to construct models that accurately reflect biological growth patterns, but this may be a challenging endeavor for highly-exploited species in which older fish are rare. Here, we use the Gulf Corvina (Cynoscion othonopterus), a vulnerable marine fish that has been persistently overfished for two decades, as a model species to compare the performance of several growth models. We fit the von Bertalanffy, Gompertz, logistic, Schnute, and Schnute-Richards growth models to length-at-age data by nonlinear least squares regression and used simple indicators to reveal biased data and ensure our results

SUBMITTER: Bolser DG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6148420 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature