Further study on the age and growth of giant stargazer, Kathetostoma giganteum, from the west coast of the South Island (STA 7) / M.J. Manning, C.P. Sutton.

NIWA project MOF2003-01J

This report presents the results of a study on the age and growth of giant stargazer in STA 7 funded by the Ministry of Fisheries as research project MOF2003-01J. The aim of the study was to estimate the age structure of giant stargazer during a trawl survey of the west coast of the South Island (WCSI), March-April 2003, and to update a previous analysis on the age and growth of giant stargazer in STA 7 with these data. An earlier study made prolific use of von Bertalanffy's "growth" model (strictly speaking, a model of mean size-at-age) and found very strong evidence suggesting that giant stargazer growth differed between the sexes and between surveys within each sex in STA 7 and between the east, south, and west coasts of the South Island within each sex. But given past criticism of the von Bertalanffy model, the authors of that study suggested that their analysis be repeated by fitting a growth model with better statistical properties to their dataset to test how sensitive their results were to the choice of model.