larvae and water masses within Long Island Sound would require an extremely 

 careful study design in order to resolve this question. This problem 

 may only be important if the estimated potential impact of Millstone on 

 the Niantic River stock is unacceptably high. 



TRAWL MONITORING PROGRAM 



The winter flounder was the most abundant fish taken by the trawl 

 monitoring program from 1973 through 1981 (64,513; 42.4% of total). A 

 complete evaluation of the trawl monitoring program may be found elsewhere 

 in this report and a portion of it is repeated here in regards to the 

 winter flounder. 



Among the objectives of the trawl monitoring program was the 

 ability to distinguish naturally occurring changes from those resulting 

 from power plant impacts. The winter flounder trawl data from October 

 1977 through September 1981 were analyzed. During this period tows of 

 0.69 km in length were made at each station regardless of the time it 

 took; previous to this period tows of 15 min in duration were made at 

 each station regardless of the distance towed. The catch frequency data 

 from this period fit a negative binomial distribution and was appropriately 

 transformed by In (catch + k/2) where k (0.83 for the winter flounder) 

 was the coefficient of contagion calculated by the maximum likelihood 

 method of Bliss and Fisher (1953) . The pooled variance of the negative 

 binomial data was used to determine the sample size required to detect 

 specified differences in the means at various levels of alpha and beta 

 using the formula of Snedecor and Cochran (1967) . For log transformed 

 data this difference becomes the ratio of the geometric means (R) . The 

 percent difference in means detectable then is (R-l) x 100%. Since the 

 winter flounder is found throughout the study area all year, it may be 



81 



