Assessing trawl-survey estimates of frequency distributions

Marine trawl surveys catch a cluster of fish at each station and fish caught together tend to have more similar characteristics, such as length, age, stomach contents etc., than those in the entire population. When this is the case, the effective sample size of estimates of the frequency distribution of a population characteristic can be much smaller than the number of fish sampled during a survey. As examples, it is shown that the effective sample size for estimates of length-frequency distributions generated by trawl surveys conducted in the Barents Sea, off Namibia and off South Africa is on average approximately one fish per tow. It is concluded that many more fish than necessary are measured at each station and that one way to increase the effective sample size for these surveys and, hence, increase the precision of the length-frequency estimates, is to reduce tow duration and use the time saved to collect samples at more stations