196 
Fishery Bulletin 99(1) 
used in the Maldivian experiment were recently manufac- 
tured and therefore this source of bias was unlikely. The 
higher tag shedding rate observed in the Maldivian data ap- 
pears most likely to be due to the tagging method employed. 
Ideally, experiment-specific double tagging experiments 
should be carried out to estimate independent experiment- 
specific tag-shedding rates. The above comparisons sug- 
gest that, in cases where independent estimates are not 
available, care must be exercised when applying estimates 
of tag-shedding rates obtained from other tagging experi- 
ments, especially where different tagging techniques have 
been used. 
Acknowledgments 
The authors would like to thank Charles Anderson, 
Graham Pilling, and Robert Wakeford for their comments 
on the manuscript. In addition to providing the data, the 
staff of Marine Research Center, particularly Zaha Waheed 
and Ahmed Haifz, helped on numerous queries regarding 
the data. We thank the Hon. Hassan Sobir, former Min- 
ster of Fisheries and Agriculture, Maizan Hassan Maniku, 
Director General Marine Research Center, for their sup- 
port in this study. The manuscript was improved by com- 
ments from two anonymous reviewers. The study was part 
of the Ph.D. research of the senior author at Imperial Col- 
lege, London, primarily funded by the Islamic Develop- 
ment Bank’s Merit Scholarship Program. 
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