Bryce Brylawski, St. Mary's College of Maryland

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Abstract:

This experiment explores the growth of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, Callinectes sapidus Rathburn, through an in situ study. This experiment was performed to asses the adequacy of the current growth model used for stock assessment, the Von Bertalanfy model; along with collecting data for the creation of an incremental stage based model more representative of the molt cycle growth method of the crabs. Thirty crabs of various sexes and sizes were randomly selected and placed in hardware cloth and PVC cages and allowed to rest insitu. Weekly monitoring yielded carapace width growth data that as of now does not provided a distinct enough picture to test the proposed hypotheses. However movement toward a new model has been bade since a growth percentage per mol coefficient appears through regression analysis of the data. The coefficient is 19.02 initial size.