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Estimation Of Mortality Rates For The Gulf Menhaden Stock And Reference Point Implementation For The Fishery, Catherine Wilhelm
Estimation Of Mortality Rates For The Gulf Menhaden Stock And Reference Point Implementation For The Fishery, Catherine Wilhelm
Master's Theses
The Gulf menhaden stock is the target of a large commercial fishery in the Gulf of Mexico. To address the needs of both the stock and fishery, I performed two studies. I first addressed the natural mortality rates currently used in the Gulf menhaden stock assessment. To update these rates, I used data from a tagging study conducted from 1970 to 1988. Adult and juvenile menhaden were tagged, released, and recovered in fish processing plants. To evaluate the data, I built a Bayesian model using the negative binomial distribution to estimate natural mortality, catchability, and the overdispersion factor parameters. I …