Aquaculture Canada and WAS North America 2022

August 15 - 18, 2022

St Johns, Newfoundland, Canada

EXPLORATION OF LENGTH-WEIGHT RELATIONSHIPS IN SCALLOPS

JOY LIU

DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY

joyliu@dal.ca

 



Length weight relationships (LWRs) are an essential component of fishery stock assessments, since they provide information about the growth of the fish, its general well being, and fitness in a marine habitat. Many researchers have shown that LWRs differ among fish species,the physiological factors such as maturity and biological factor (sex).

Scallops play an important role in the fishery markets in Atlantic Canada.People like to buy them from the fishery markets since they contain a huge amount of nutritive protein and  other essential nutrients such as Omega-3 required by the body. Many health magazines claim that scallops can be used as a treatment for conditions like diabetes and indigestion. Using machines to dig in the sea floor will have a negative impact on the living environment of scallops. Furthermore, if catching many immature small  shells  at a time  is not conducive to sustainable development, then it is  crucial for us to know how environmental factors will affect the LWRs.

Here, we want to explore how the environmental factors and time factor will affect LWRs in scallops in NS. Here we assume our observations of scallops are all the same kind with all the same  physiological factors in this research. Our goal is to set up a statistical model that can predict the scallop meat weight by a given size scallop based on and other factor values.           

In this research, we will first introduce the possible environmental factors which will affect the LWRs and the relationships among those explanatory variables. Then we will decide on a suitable model which can not only explain the LWRs well but also using the environmental factors. Afterwards, we can use the splitting test method to test our results and do the residual analysis to evaluate our model.