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Fishery Bulletin 101(3) 



chrysops, a Mid-Atlantic demersal schooling roundfish, 

 likely to yield a relatively high catch per trip). These spe- 

 cies were selected as examples because they occur over a 

 broad range along the northeast U.S. coast, are among the 

 most frequently caught by recreational fishermen, and 

 their catch-rate distributions are representative of most 

 species caught by recreational fishermen in the northeast 

 US (USDOC, 1992). Four configurations of catch rate dis- 

 tributions were examined: 1 ) catch per trip distributions 

 including zero catches, 2) catch per trip distributions with 

 positive catches only, 3 ) catch per hour distributions includ- 

 ing zero catches, and 4) catch per hour distributions with 

 positive catches only. 



Goodness-of-fit statistics for the lognormal, Poisson, 

 and negative binomial distributions were calculated for 

 the four individual species and for all species to help judge 

 which error structure best characterized the MRFSS 

 catch-rate data. A single year ( 1996) is presented because 

 of the similarity of the catch distributions across species 

 and time. Given the results of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov 

 D tests from the descriptive statistics work, which in- 

 dicated that none of the catch rates were normally dis- 

 tributed (see "Results" section), that error structure was 

 not examined further. As with the descriptive statistics 

 analysis, both catch-per-trip and catch-per-hour rates 

 were examined in the goodness-of-fit exercise, both for 



