October 9, 2014 — The Save the Summer Flounder Fishery Fund, in association with the Science Center for Marine Fisheries and the University of Southern Mississippi, has announced it will be funding research into the development of a sex-specific population assessment model to be applied to summer flounder stocks off the Atlantic coast.
The research is being undertaken in cooperation with the scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Service.
"One of the challenges of summer flounder is that it is sexually dimorphic," said Dr. Patrick Sullivan of Cornell University who will be developing the model
"Females are a different size than the males at the same age. That difference in size in is not taken into account in the current model."
Dr. Sullivan is an associate professor of Population and Community Dynamics in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University.
He has an M.S. in Fisheries Biology and a Ph.D. in Biomathematics and Biostatistics from the University of Washington and his research focuses primarily on assessment and management of marine and freshwater fisheries
The model now in use is the Age Structured Assessment Program (ASAP) that forecasts fishing mortality by year and age to estimate population sizes.
Read the full story at the Asbury Park Press