I'm going to use this thread to initiate interest in the black rockfish round-robin exchange before requesting an official CARE exchange number from Andrew.
Please respond if your lab would like to be included and provide the following info:
1. Lab name and contact person for the exchange
2. Do you have 50 black fish to contribute from your state? What is the size range of fish?
3. Is the scientist who aged vermilion rockfish as part of the 2020 round-robin is available to participate in the black rockfish round robin? If we have a few of the same people for both species comparisons that will add insight to the analyses.
4. How many scientists from your lab will age the black rockfish in this exchange?
5. Are there any biogeographical breaks in your state (e.g., Cape Mendocino in CA) that may lead to differences in growth in black rockfish? If yes, do you have 50 structures from each region?
Thanks!
Melissa
p.s. If I don't get any responses here, I'll send out a Google Form 🙂
Hi Melissa,
We don't have anything close to 50 samples as we only get maybe 1 otolith per year from our combo survey. We are likely to age some CA black rockfish samples though and would benefit from participating in any round robin exchange. In the past, we have had Tyler or Nikki age black rockfish. Betty was our vermilion age reader. I had planned on Tyler ageing the black rockfish for this assessment, as Betty will have her hands full with canary.
Hey Melissa,
1) Newport Ageing Lab (CAP) - Patrick McDonald
2) We have no samples
3) We could get Betty to participate if there is time. Otherwise Tyler would age for exchange. Could be 2-3 people.
Thanks for keeping this moving along
Patrick
Hi Melissa,
Thanks for putting this together. Hopefully this addresses everything, but please let me know if you have any questions.
1. ADF&G-Juneau (AKA Age Determination Unit)- Chris Hinds and Cathy Mattson (chris.hinds@alaska.gov and cathy.mattson@alaska.gov)
2. Yes, we'd be able to put together a sample of 50 otoliths, and most fish are between ~30cm-60cm from commercial samples. We could pull smaller fish if needed and we've been working on species corrections using otolith weight at age.
3. N/A. We currently don't have anyone calibrated on vermillion.
4. Likely 2
5. Our lab focuses on Southeast AK commercial black rockfish. Across the rest of the State, Elisa Russ, Martin Schuster, and Sonya El Mejjati would have representatives of other geographical areas.
Hi Melissa,
1) ODFW-Mark Terwilliger
2) Yes, we have lots of structures, size ranging from ~290mm-540mm
3) I participated in the Vermilion round robin and will participate in the Black Rockfish round robin
4) I will be the sole reader
5) I haven't noticed any growth differences based on geography but if there is a desire to do so, we have plenty of samples to possibly exchange.
Hi Melissa,
1. ADF&G-Homer sportfish - Marian Ford
2. Yes, we would be able to put together a sample of 50 otoliths. Most of our sportfish sampled fish are between ~20-60cm
3. N/A.
4. We usually have 2-3 readers working on blacks.
5. Our lab focuses on Southcentral AK sport caught black rockfish. I'm not aware of any geographical growth differences in our area.
Hi folks, I'm getting Southeast AKs otos ready. Is anyone going to take photos of the otoliths or annotate images? if so what program are you using? thanks-cathy
Hi Cathy - I use GIMP (freeware) and then export them as tiffs. Not sure how the layers work doing that way.
@crmattson at this point in time I'm not going to make images a priority. I've got a couple thousand more samples to age and I just got about 700 more maturity ageing samples dumped on me today. Maybe during a non-assessment year, but I don't think I'll have the time this year.
