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Fishery Bulletin 105(3) 



by the Chilean longline fishery (Cerna^), like those 

 caught near Hawaii, is better described by the stan- 

 dard VBGF, and large swordfish are also abundant in 

 the relatively undeveloped Chilean fishery. Chapman's 

 five-parameter version of the generalized VBGF would 

 be the most appropriate for describing size-at-age of 

 swordfish only if there was a compelling reason to fit 

 the growth curve through zero length at zero age (see 

 Arocha et al., 2003). 



Our growth-at-liberty data for tagged-recaptured 

 swordfish in the central North Pacific, albeit limited to 

 only three fish, are consistent with modeled growth of 

 small- to medium-size adult fish. Restrepo (1990) and 

 Brown (1995) provide the only other data of this type 

 for swordfish, limited to fish caught in the Atlantic 



Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. The usefulness of such data 

 is limited because of inaccuracies in estimates of body 

 size at time of first capture (Restrepo, 1990) — as it was 

 for our tagged swordfish — and uncertain units of size 

 measurement (Brown, 1995), but some general growth 

 patterns are nonetheless evident. For nearly 100 sword- 

 fish with a median length of about 100 cm at initial 

 capture and of 135 em when recaptured after a median 

 period at liberty of 1.5 years, the growth rate was about 

 24 cm per yr (Brown, 1995). Given that body size when 

 a fish is tagged is usually overestimated (Restrepo, 

 1990), and this body size yields an underestimate of 

 incremental growth at liberty and given also the likely 

 faster growth of swordfish in the Pacific — especially the 

 central North Pacific — see below, the average growth in- 



