in Table 12, indicated that the composition was significantly affected 

 by season, station and the interaction of season and station. 



Finally, the time series approach to the data produced models that, 

 to some extent, described the patterns of abundance of the shore-zone 

 fish. Additionally, the models produced forecasts that could be compared 

 to actual data. The results from the time series investigations are 

 presented in Table 13. 



DISCUSSION 

 In order to address the first objective, i.e., describe the occurrence, 

 distribution and relative abundance of potentially impacted shore-zone 

 finfish in the Greater Millstone Bight, 'shore-zone' and 'potentially 

 impacted' were defined. The shore- zone finfish were considered to be 

 those species captured by the beach seines (see Table 4). These finfish 

 were typical of those found in shore-zone assemblages along the Northeast 

 Atlantic Coast from New York (Briggs and O'Connor 1971) through Long 

 Island Sound (Warfel and Merriman 1944; LILCo 1980) and the Mystic River 

 estuary, Connecticut (Pearcy and Richards 1962) to Rhode Island (Mulkana 

 1966). The pattern of fluctuations in the catches of these fish over 

 time, was either seasonal (eg. silversides, Fig. 2) or occasional (eg. 

 Atlantic menhaden, Fig. 2). Seasonally, the catch of silversides drops 

 to zero when the shore-zone fish migrate from shallow areas to deeper 

 regions during the winter to avoid low temperatures, wave action and 

 turbidity (Briggs and O'Connor 1971; Hillman et al. (1977). The Atlantic 

 menhaden population typically exhibits large fluctuations (Bigelow and 

 Schroeder 1953) and their frequent absence from the Millstone Bight 

 shore zones was not unexpected. Thus catches of fish during certain 



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