Fishery Bulletin 119(1) 
Low availability of data is a common problem in studies 
of elasmobranch growth because most of the data on spe- 
cies of low value in fisheries usually come from instances 
of bycatch; therefore, it becomes difficult to determine the 
real asymptotic size for such species (White et al., 2014). 
Nevertheless, our results were similar to those of other 
studies in which the GM was a better fit to data and 
yielded more realistic estimates of growth parameters 
(Mollet and Cailliet, 2002; Carlson and Baremore, 2003; 
Neer and Thompson, 2005). 
Information on the age structure and growth parame- 
ters provided from our study is valuable input for further 
demographic studies. The data are useful for estimating 
the trajectory of stock productivity and the resilience to 
fishing of the golden cownose ray. 
Acknowledgments 
We express our gratitude to A. Grant for English editing 
and I. Martinez for help in early language revision. We 
thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading 
of our manuscript and their insightful comments and sug- 
gestions. We also thank R. Bonfil for his comments on the 
manuscript. We dedicate this article to the life and work 
of J. Musick. This research was funded by Universidad 
Autonoma de Sinaloa, through the project PROFAPI-UAS 
(99-2013). 
Literature cited 
Anislado-Tolentino, V., M. Gallardo-Cabello, F. Amezcua-Linares, 
and C. Robinson-Mendoza. 
2008. Age and growth of the scalloped hammerhead shark, 
Sphyrna lewini (Griffith & Smith, 1834) from the southern 
coast of Sinaloa, Mexico. Hidrobiologica 18:31—40. 
Beamish, R. J. 
1979. Differences in the age of Pacific hake (Merluccius 
productus) using whole otoliths and sections of otoliths. 
J. Fish. Res. Board Can. 36:141-151. 
Beamish, R. J., and D. A. Fournier. 
1981. A method for comparing the precision of a set of age 
determinations. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 38:982—983. 
Bishop, S. D. H., M. P. Francis, C. Duffy, and J. C. Montgomery. 
2006. Age, growth, maturity, longevity and natural mortal- 
ity of the shortfin mako shark (surus oxyrinchus) in New 
Zealand waters. Mar. Freshw. Res. 57:143-154. 
Bizzarro, J. J., W. D. Smith, J. F. Marquez-Farias, and R. E. Hueter. 
2007. Artisanal fisheries and reproductive biology of the 
golden cownose ray, Rhinoptera steindachneri Evermann 
and Jenkins, 1891, in the northern Mexican Pacific. Fish. 
Res. 84:137-146. 
Burgos-Vazquez, M. I., V. E. Chavez-Garcia, V. H. Cruz-Escalona, 
A. F. Navia, and P. A. Mejia-Falla. 
2018. Reproductive strategy of the Pacific cownose ray Rhi- 
noptera steindachneri in the southern Gulf of California. 
Mar. Freshw. Res. 70:93—106. 
Burnham, K. P., and D. R. Anderson. 
2002. Model selection and multimodel inference: a practical 
information-theoretic approach, 2nd ed., 488 p. Springer 
Science, New York. 
Cailliet, G. M. 
2015. Perspectives on elasmobranch life-history studies: a 
focus on age validation and relevance to fishery manage- 
ment. J. Fish Biol. 87:1271-1292. 
Cailliet, G. M., and K. J. Goldman. 
2004. Age determination and validation in chondrichthyan 
fishes. In Biology of sharks and their relatives (J. C. Carrier, 
J. A. Musick, and M. R. Heithaus, eds.), p. 399-447. CRC 
Press, Boca Raton, FL. 
Cailliet, G. M., W. D. Smith, H. F. Mollet, and K. J. Goldman. 
2006. Age and growth studies of chondrichthyan fishes: the 
need for consistency in terminology, verification, valida- 
tion, and growth function fitting. Environ. Biol. Fishes 
77:211-228. 
Campana, S. E. 
2001. Accuracy, precision and quality control in age determi- 
nation, including a review of the use and abuse of age vali- 
dation methods. J. Fish Biol. 59:197—242. 
Campana, S. E., M. C. Annand, and J. I. McMillan. 
1995. Graphical and statistical methods for determining the 
consistency of age determinations. Trans. Am. Fish. Soc. 
124:131-138. 
Carlson, J. K., and I. E. Baremore. 
2003. Changes in biological parameters of Atlantic sharpnose 
shark Rhizoprionodon terraenovae in the Gulf of Mexico: 
evidence for density-dependent growth and maturity? Mar. 
Freshw. Res. 54:227-234. 
Chang, W. Y. B. 
1982. A statistical method for evaluating the reproduc- 
ibility of age determination. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 
39:1208-1210. 
Chapman, D. G. 
1961. Statistical problems in dynamics of exploited fisheries 
population. Jn Proceedings of the fourth Berkeley sympo- 
sium on mathematical statistics and probability. Volume 4: 
contributions to biology and problems of medicine; Berkeley, 
20 June—30 July 1960 (J. Neyman, ed.), p. 153-168. Univ. 
Calif. Press, Berkeley, CA. 
Coll, M., M. G. Pennino., J. Steenbeek., J. Sole., and J. M. Bellido. 
2019. Predicting marine species distributions: complemen- 
tarity of food-web and Bayesian hierarchical modelling 
approaches. Ecol. Model. 405:86-101. 
Cortés, E. 
1998. Demographic analysis as an aid in shark stock assess- 
ment and management. Fish. Res. 39:199-208. 
Cortés, E., E. N. Brooks, and K. W. Shertzer. 
2015. Risk assessment of cartilaginous fish populations. 
ICES J. Mar. Sci. 72:1057-1068. 
Davis, C. D., G. M. Cailliet, and D. A. Ebert. 
2007. Age and growth of the roughtail skate Bathyraja 
trachura (Gilbert 1892) from the eastern North Pacific. 
Environ. Biol. Fishes 80:325. 
Doll, J. C., and S. J. Jacquemin. 
2018. Introduction to Bayesian modeling and inference for 
fisheries scientists. Fisheries 43:152-161. 
Dono, F., S. Montealegre-Quijano, A. Domingo, and P. G. Kinas. 
2015. Bayesian age and growth analysis of the shortfin 
mako shark Jsurus oxyrinchus in the western South 
Atlantic Ocean using a flexible model. Environ. Biol. 
Fishes 98:517-533. 
Fisher, R. A., G. C. Call, and R. D. Grubbs. 
2013. Age, growth, and reproductive biology of cownose rays 
in Chesapeake Bay. Mar. Coast. Fish. 5:224—235. 
Gallucci, V. F., and T. J. Quinn II. 
1979. Reparameterizing, fitting, and testing a simple growth 
model. Trans. Am. Fish. Soc. 108:14—25. 
