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Fishery Bulletin 111(4) 
Kimberley: Females 
B 
Kimberley: Males 
North Queensland: Females 
D 
North Queensland: Males 
Cape York 
North Queensland and Kimberley 
Figure 3 
Fits of the von Bertalanffy growth function by sex and region for John’s Snapper (Lutja- 
nus johnii) sampled during the period of February 1989-April 2002 in northern Australia. 
Females (gray triangles) and males (open circles) are distinguished in separate curves for 
the (A, B) Kimberley and (C, D) north Queensland regions. A single curve describes the 
small sample size (n) for (E) Cape York, where a large proportion of fish were of unknown 
sex (shaded squares). Significantly different growth curves describe eastern and western 
fish (F) when sexes were pooled. For more information on growth estimates and compari- 
sons from these models, see Tables 1 and 2. 
Kimberley and north Queensland regions for each sex, 
and a significant main effect of region on the slope of 
transformed length at age (Table 2). The larger L „ and 
K for samples from north Queensland, therefore, were 
significantly different from those values for samples 
from the Kimberley and Cape York regions, but there 
was no significant difference between values for Cape 
York and Kimberley fish. 
Otolith weight at age 
The sagittae of John’s Snapper are exceptionally large, 
and the largest otolith weighed in this study exceeded 
5 g. Second-order polynomials provided the best fits for 
otolith weight at age with R 2 values of 0.77-0.95 (Table 
3; Fig. 4). Very small values for the slope parameter c 
indicate that these relationships were close to linear 
