Evaluation Of Juvenile Menhaden Abundance Data For Prediction Of Commercial Harvest

Juvenile gulf menhaden (Brevoortia patronus) data were extracted from otter trawl surveys conducted along the Louisiana coast since 1966. The relationships between various abundance indexes and commercial harvest of age-I fish were determined by correlation and linear regression analyses. Several indexes were significantly correlated at the 0.95 and 0.99 level with commercial harvest. The strongest indexes, involving frequency of occurrence of more than 25 or 50 gulf menhaden in samples, were used to predict commercial landings. Recommendations were made to continue monitoring the relationship between these abundance indexes and commercial harvest.