The objectives of the 2025 workshop were to: (1) Age samples collected and prepared from labs along the Atlantic coast for Atlantic menhaden, black sea bass, red drum, scup, striped bass, tautog, and winter flounder; (2) Identify areas of inconsistency that persist for processing or reading ageing structures; (3) Provide information on ageing error for each species to inform future stock assessments, including APE for group consensus ages and comparisons between individual agers that routinely age each species; (4) Develop recommendations to address any problems that emerge from this workshop so as to improve age data along the Atlantic coast;…
Ageing Research
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The goals of the Atlantic menhaden ageing structure exchange are to: (1) Establish methods to prepare and read otoliths and/or scales; (2) Determine the precision and bias of age reading data between different readers and labs or agencies along the coast; (3) Make recommendations to improve and standardize ageing practices; and (4) Move bait sample ageing from the Beaufort Lab to the states
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Attendees of the workshop met to go over the APE for each species and results from individual age readers, revisit samples with high disagreement, and make recommendations for following workshops or coastwide ageing.
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Black sea bass, bluefish, cobia, red drum, scup, tautog, and weakfish were identified as species to evaluate for the 2023 workshop which took place from March 8-9th at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FL FWRI) in St. Petersburg, FL. This is the first year that cobia and weakfish have been evaluated by the workshop.
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The in-person ageing workshop took place in December, 2019, at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries facility in Gloucester. Participants aged tautog opercula, spines, sectioned otoliths, and whole otoliths and ageing precision was evaluated using average percent error
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The Third Edition includes contributions from many more agencies and universities from the Gulf region as well as the Atlantic. A number of techniques and species are described beyond the original scope of the manual.
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Striped bass, Atlantic croaker, winter flounder, summer flounder, American eel, and tautog were identified as species to evaluate for the 2019 workshop which took place from March 20-21 at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FL FWRI) in St. Petersburg, FL.
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Red drum, striped bass, scup, black sea bass, river herring, Atlantic menhaden, bluefish, and tautog were identified as species to evaluate for the 2018 workshop which took place from March 27-28 at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FL FWRI) in St. Petersburg, FL.
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The goals of the workshop were to exchange samples processed and read from state agencies and research groups to provide information on ageing precision, bias between labs or in-lab for those with multiple readers, compare sectioned and whole otolith samples, and to improve standardization of ageing practices between states.
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