The species composition of the shore-zone catch was compared to 

 that reported from the impingement and entrainment sampling programs 

 (Table 5) . Of the five selected species collected by seine, three could 

 be considered 'potentially impacted 1 by entrainment or impingement as 

 they contributed at least 1% to those collections as well. They were 

 silversides, Atlantic menhaden and sand lance. 



The catch statistics varied with time, station and species. The 

 juveniles of Atlantic menhaden are very abundant in the shore zone only 

 occasionally, and the CPUE exhibited a sporadic pattern, while silversides 

 CPUE exhibited a regular, seasonal pattern at nearly all stations (Fig. 

 2). Even though these two species' patterns of abundance are dissimilar, 

 in both cases, the CPUE drops to many times. Such a situation produces 

 highly skewed, non-normal sample distributions for all of the important 

 selected species as well as for total catch (Fig. 3). The results of 

 the Shapiro-Wilke test for normality on the total catch and for the CPUE 

 of selected species are presented in Table 6. Also shown are the results 

 when log transformation was used. Neither were found to normalize the 

 data. 



Frequently, highly skewed data approximate a negative binomial 

 distribution (Poole 1974), and such a possibility was investigated. A 

 goodness-of-f it test (chi-square) of the data to the negative binomial 

 distribution based on the maximum likelihood estimator of k, indicated 

 that the data did not come from this type of distribution either (Table 

 7). 



Another characteristic of the data base to be investigated was its 

 autocorrelation structure. The correlations between data points at 

 various lags can be represented by the autocorrelation function (ACF) . 



51 



