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Fishery Bulletin 103(1) 



137° 136° 135° 134° 133° 132° 131° 130° 



Figure 1 



Map of southeast Alaska with regions where quillback rockfish 

 (Sebastes maliger) used for otolith radiocarbon analyses were 

 captured. Quillback rockfish were collected from random subsam- 

 pling of catches from commercial longline fishing vessels in the 

 coastal waters off southeast Alaska (CSEO: Central Southeast 

 Offshore (outside), SSEI: Southern Southeast Inshore, SSEO: 

 Southern Southeast Offshore, and NSEI Northern Southeast 

 Inshore (inside)) by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 

 Juneau, AK, in 2000. Note that the specific geographic location 

 for individual fish during the first year of life is unknown; how- 

 ever, life history information indicates that quillback rockfish 

 are not migratory and exhibit residential behavior in shallow- 

 water habitat. Hence, the general location of the fish collected 

 and used in this study may be useful in a broad context. 



(rc=43) was used for temporal calibration of the quill- 

 back rockfish record (Andrews et al., 2002; Kerr et al., 

 2004). The level of concordance between the years of 

 initial rise in 14 C in the two time series was the basis 

 for validating the otolith-based age estimates of the 

 quillback rockfish. The degree of agreement between 

 the 14 C time series, spanning the pre- to postbomb era, 

 for the quillback and yelloweye rockfishes was examined 

 to demonstrate the effectiveness of determining the year 

 of initial rise in 14 C as an age validation method, and 

 whether the entire time series for the quillback provided 



any further information relevant to age validation. To 

 do this, the yelloweye rockfish 14 C time series was di- 

 vided into three intervals (prebomb, bomb rise, and 

 postbomb) and fitted with confidence intervals. The pre- 

 bomb era 14 C values (1950-57) were fitted with an aver- 

 age (±2 SD); the bomb rise (1959-71) and postbomb era 

 values (1966-85) were fitted with a linear regression 

 and corresponding 95% prediction intervals. A qualita- 

 tive comparison of the quillback rockfish 14 C record was 

 made with other existing marine records: two Hawaiian 

 Islands coral records — Oahu (Toggweiler et al., 1991) 



