Fitting growth models to length frequency data

A novel two-stage procedure for fitting growth curves to length frequency data collected from commercial fisheries is described. The method is suitable for species in which cohorts are spawned over a limited time period, and samples of length frequency data are collected regularly (e.g. in weekly, fortnightly, or monthly time intervals) over an extended time period. In the first stage of analysis, Gaussian mixtures are fitted separately to the data for each time interval, and summary statistics (component means and standard errors) are extracted. In the second stage, parametric growth models, such as the von Bertalanffy seasonal growth curve, are fitted to the summary data. The error structure in this second stage of analysis incorporates random between-year effects, random within-year age-group effects, random within-year time-interval effects, random within-year age-group and time-interval interactions, and sampling errors. This complex error structure incorporating unbalanced crossed and nested random effects acknowledges that commercial fishing is not an exercise in random sampling, and allows for the inevitable additional sources of random variation in such an enterprise. The method is applied to South Australian southern bluefin tuna length frequency data collected from 1964 to 1989, and leads to the conclusion that juvenile tuna grew faster in the 1980s than in the 1960s, with the 1970s being a decade of highly variable growth. (C) 2004 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.