Estimation of Abalone Mortality Rates with Growth Analysis

Abstract

We describe a maximum-likelihood procedure for obtaining simultaneous estimates of growth and total-mortality rates from size-frequency distributions. The method is applied to size data from simulations and from two populations of northern abalone Haliotis kamtschatkana in British Columbia. Total-mortality-rate estimates varied with the assumed number of age classes and other model variables, but this variation was satisfyingly small. Received May 22, 1982 Accepted February 5, 1983