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Growth Rates and Size Distributions of First‐year Smallmouth Bass Populations: Some Conclusions from Experiments and a Model
Author(s) -
Deangelis D. L.,
Coutant C. C.
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
transactions of the american fisheries society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.696
H-Index - 86
eISSN - 1548-8659
pISSN - 0002-8487
DOI - 10.1577/1548-8659(1979)108<137:grasdo>2.0.co;2
Subject(s) - bass (fish) , biology , fishery , environmental science
Growth rates of populations of first‐year smallmouth bass (Micropterus dolomieui Lacépède) were studied during the first few weeks of life at temperatures ranging from 15.2 to 32.5 C. In all cases, the average length of fish in each group increased linearly with time, t, in a range from 10 to 30 mm. The variances about these mean lengths increased approximately as t 2 . A partial differential equation model can be useful in expressing the dynamics of populations in which size distributions are taken into consideration. Applied to our experiment, this type of model shows that both of the observed length‐versus‐time phenomena are expected if the rates of increase of length of fish are independent of length and that these rates for individual fish are normally distributed about some mean rate of growth. The variance of individual growth rates needed to produce the observed length‐versus‐time data can be calculated from the model.