EVALUATION OF 3 LENGTH-BASED METHODS FOR ESTIMATING GROWTH IN TROPICAL FISHES - THE RED SNAPPER LUTJANUS-CAMPECHANUS OF THE CAMPECHE BANK (MEXICO)

Growth of the red snapper Lutjanus campechanus off the Campeche Bank w as estimated by the length-based methods ELEFAN, SLCA and PROJMAT, the last two applied for the first time to this resource. The jackknife t echnique was applied to deal with uncertainty in growth estimates resu lting from chance variations in sampling design. Results differed amon g methods: ELEFAN overestimated L infinity, whereas PROJMAT and SLCA g ave parameter estimates within the range reported in the literature. R esults derived from jackknife analysis revealed lowest variability in the precision estimators - percent error and coefficient of variation - when applying SLCA and PROJMAT. Estimates of the comparative growth index phi' agreed with those observed for different geographic regions (between 2.92 and 3.19), except for ELEFAN. We suggest to abandon the use of the ELEFAN method in favour of recently developed SLCA and PRO JMAT.