Sand lance were found in the plankton, seine, trawl and impingement 

 collections (Table 1) . Larvae ranked second in plankton collections at 

 NB and third at EN, and were found in these samples from January to May; 

 eggs were not abundant in plankton collections. While sand lance was 

 the third most abundant shore-zone species, it contributed less than 3% 

 to the species composition from 1976-1983. Young-of-the-year (modal 

 length of 80 mm) (Fig. 2) were most abundant in seine collections July 

 to 



50 



68 



70 



80 



90 



100 



t 10 



120 



130 



140 



150 



50 



100 150 

 FREQUENCY 



200 



Figure 2. Length frequency of A. americanus in seines from October 1976 

 through September 1983. 



October. Sand lance were not observed in great numbers in trawls or 

 impingement. When found in trawls, they appeared primarily at NR and BR 

 (Table 3) from January to March (Table 4) . 



Sand lance modeling was limited to larval log-transformed abundance data 

 at EN and NB. Season was found to be a significant multiplicative 

 regressor in the larval models (season was from August through October 

 and 1 at other times. Table 4). There was no evidence of long term (>12 mo) 

 abundance cycles. Annual cycles were found at both plankton stations. 

 The shorter term cycles (4 mo) were evidence of consistent fluctuations 

 within each year. Harmonic regressions modeled the data reasonably well 

 as evident from the R^ values (Table 5) . The forecast errors for the 



12 



