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Fishery Bulletin 106(3) 
1 80°0’0" 160°0'0"W 140°0'0"W 120°0'0"W 
Figure 1 
Recovery locations (o) of sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) tagged and released as juveniles 
in southeast Alaska. St. John Baptist Bay was the most common release site. Vertical and 
horizontal bars are regulatory area boundaries. Gulf of Alaska is shown as GOA for the 
Western, Central, and Eastern areas. 
Materials and methods 
Juvenile sablefish were captured, primarily with jigging 
gear (Rutecki and Varosi, 1997) in various bays and 
inlets of southeast Alaska, for tagging and release from 
1985 to 2005. A total of 74 sites were selected during 
that period, but most tagging after 1987 was undertaken 
in St. John Baptist Bay near Sitka, Alaska (Fig. 1), 
because it was easily accessible and juvenile sablefish 
were consistently found there. Bottom depth is about 30 
m and fish were caught on the bottom and throughout the 
water column. Release and recovery data for these fish 
are maintained in the NMFS Alaska Sablefish Tag Data- 
base, which is described in detail by Fujioka et al. (1988). 
Data criteria 
Recovered fish had to meet several criteria to be included 
in this study: recovery year had to be known, recovery 
depth and location had to be accurate, and the fish had 
to be at liberty for at least one year. Recovery year 
was necessary to calculate age at recapture. Accurate 
recovery depth and location were necessary to reliably 
assign recovery depth strata and areas. Only recover- 
ies for which there were reported positions that were 
precise to within 10 minutes of latitude and longitude 
were used; this criterion was used to judge the reli- 
ability of the recovery information. Some tag recoveries 
had accurate recovery location but no depth informa- 
tion; these tag recoveries were included in the area 
analysis, but not the depth analysis. Recovery depths 
were classified into seven depth strata chosen to reflect 
general habitat type: 1-100 m (nearshore), 101-200 m 
(continental shelf), 201-300 m (shelf break), 301-500 m 
(upper continental slope), 501-700 m (middle slope), 
701-1000 m (lower slope), and >1000 m (deep water). 
Recovery locations were classified into seven areas: 
Aleutian Islands, Bering Sea, western Gulf of Alaska 
(western GOA), central Gulf of Alaska (central GOA), 
eastern Gulf of Alaska outside waters (eastern GOA 
outside), eastern Gulf of Alaska inside waters (eastern 
GOA inside), and British Columbia. For some analyses, 
inside and outside waters were pooled and referred to 
as eastern GOA. The minimum time at liberty of one 
year was imposed to exclude short-term movements and 
to focus on migration. 
Age at release was determined from fish size and 
time of year. Depending on the time of year, in most 
years and tagging areas, no more than two ages of 
fish, and usually only one, were present at the time 
of tagging. Ages were readily separable by means of 
non-overlapping length frequencies and by time of year. 
Age-0 fish enter into bays from the ocean in the fall of 
their first year of life, and they average 21-23 cm in 
length (Rutecki and Varosi, 1997). One-year-old fish in 
the middle of summer average 31-35 cm and 2-year-old 
fish average 40-45 cm. The number of years at liberty 
after release was calculated by subtracting the release 
year from the recovery year; adding this number to the 
release age supplied the recovery age. 
