NOTE McBnde et a\ Recruitment of Pomatomus saltatrix to estuaries 



393 



one specimen appeared in our otolith analysis. The 

 winter data used in our study may be inappropriate 

 for sampling fall-spawned bluefish because the trawl 

 fishery uses a large mesh size and fishes in deep 

 water (Table 1). Presumptive fall-spawned YOY fish 

 were uncommon in previous surveys between North 

 Carolina and Florida (Table 3). Wenner & Sedberry 



(1989) speculated that they had col- 

 lected fall-spawned fish during Janu- 

 ary and May trawl collections in 

 nearshore habitat of the SAB, but their 

 interpretation may have been con- 

 founded by use of age-length relation- 

 ships from Wilk (1977). Wilk's growth 

 estimates do not account for inter- 

 cohort differences in size-at-first-annu- 

 lus or in growth rates (Lassiter 1962, 

 McBride & Conover 1991). Future 

 analysis of age structure of young blue- 

 fish in the SAB should focus on this 

 cohort. 



Implications for relative contribution of 

 each cohort We observed polymodal 

 length distributions that represented the 

 size difference between spring- and 

 summer-spawned YOY bluefish cohorts 

 during the fall. Barger (1990) reported 

 that bluefish collected in the SAB had a 

 backcalculated mean FL at Annulus-I of 290mm. This 

 size matches the mean FL at Annulus-I reported for 

 spring-spawned fish from North Carolina in the late 

 1950s (Lassiter 1962). This observation supports the 

 conclusion that the spring-spawned cohort is of domi- 

 nant abundance relative to the other cohorts, as inter- 



preted by Chiarella & Conover (1990). 



