504 
Fishery Bulletin 96(3), 1998 
Figure 1 
Locations of Atka mackerel sample collections in the western Aleutian (543), central Aleutian (542), and 
eastern Aleutian Islands (541), and western Gulf of Alaska (610) fishery management areas. The U.S. Exclu- 
sive Economic Zone (EEZ) is also shown. 
growth parameters were determined with a nonlin- 
ear least squares procedure (FISHPARM 4 ). 
Similarly, length-weight relationships were esti- 
mated from the following equation: 
w = al b , 
where weight (w) varies as a power (b) of length (Z). 
The coefficients a and b were estimated for each of 
the four management areas with a nonlinear least 
squares procedure ( FISHPARM 4 ). On the basis of the 
work of Kimura and Ronholt (1988), who found that 
sex was not an important differentiating variable for 
growth in Atka mackerel, we present growth curves 
for the sexes combined. 
The age-length and length-weight growth curves 
for the four management areas were estimated and 
compared with an F-test. To further test for the sig- 
nificance of the differences among areas, regardless 
of the fit to the von Bertalanffy or length-weight 
curves, a two-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) 
4 Prager, M. H., C. W. Recksiek, and S. B. Saila. 1987. 
Nonlinear parameter estimation for fisheries. Michael Prager, 
Old Dominion University, Dep. of Oceanography, Norfolk, VA 
23508. Unpubl. documentation. 
Table 1 
Sample sizes of aged Atka mackerel otoliths from the Gulf 
of Alaska (area 610), eastern Aleutian Islands (area 541), 
central Aleutian Islands (area 542), and western Aleutian 
Islands (area 543) fishery 
management areas (Fig. 1). 
Gulf 
Eastern 
Central 
Western 
of 
Aleutian 
Aleutian 
Aleutian 
Age 
Alaska 
Islands 
Islands 
Islands 
(yr) 
(610) 
(541) 
(542) 
(543) 
Total 
2 
22 
2 
18 
19 
61 
3 
1 
7 
55 
53 
116 
4 
19 
9 
22 
10 
60 
5 
43 
15 
30 
25 
113 
6 
9 
44 
19 
20 
92 
7 
1 
8 
7 
5 
21 
8 
0 
7 
7 
8 
22 
9 
0 
1 
4 
5 
10 
10 
0 
1 
1 
13 
15 
Total 
95 
94 
163 
158 
510 
was applied to the age-length and the length-weight 
data with SPLUS software (Chambers and Hastie, 
1992). The age-length AN OVA included age and area 
as factors and an age x area interaction term, and 
