148 



Fishery Bulletin 93(1). 1995 



£12 

 O 10 - 



CD 



M 



X = 36 cm 



n = 41 



M^ 



10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120 



Carapace Length (cm) 



Figure 7 



Length frequencies of green turtles, Chelonia mydas, collected along the 

 Atlantic coast of Florida from 1986 to 1991. 



Trawl surveys conducted by NMFS and the U.S. 

 Army Corps of Engineers from 1974 to 1984 estab- 

 lished that marine turtles, especially loggerhead 

 turtles, aggregate in the Port Canaveral ship chan- 

 nel. Henwood (1987a) reported a loggerhead CPUE 

 of 2.00 to 4.86 turtles/hour from July to October 1980, 



increasing to 12.05 turtles/hour in November. But- 

 ler et al. (1987) noted that mean CPUE by month 

 was greater than 10 loggerhead turtles/hour from 

 November 1981 to March 1982 and that there were 

 lower CPUE values from April to September 1982. 

 The CPUE values cited from the previous studies are 

 greater than those in the present 

 analysis, which may be attributable 

 to the different objectives of the 

 present study and the former trawl 

 surveys. The CPUE data presented 

 by Henwood (1987a) were collected 

 during trawl surveys designed to re- 

 duce turtle mortality from mainte- 

 nance dredging in the Port Canaveral 

 ship channel. Butler et al. ( 1987) con- 

 ducted surveys of the channel to de- 

 velop methods of estimating logger- 

 head abundance. Marine turtles were 

 the target species in both of these 

 studies. The CPUE values reported 

 in this study should be viewed as rep- 

 resentative of turtles taken in the 

 commercial shrimp fishery of east- 

 central Florida. 



The data on loggerhead turtles col- 

 lected in the present analysis are 

 similar to the earlier investigations 

 of Henwood ( 1987a). Most of the log- 



