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Gear

The Juvenile Striped Bass Seine Survey at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) originally used a 6 foot x 100 foot x 0.25 inch (2 meters x 30.5 meters x 6.4 millimeters) mesh-bag seine. However, after comparison tows with Maryland gear, 4 ft x 100 ft x 0.25 in mesh (1.2 m x 30.5 m x 6.4 mm mesh) showed virtually no statistical differences in catch, Virginia adopted the "Maryland seine" in 1986.

The original purpose of the gear-comparison studies was to standardize methods, thereby allowing a baywide examination of recruitment success. This was never realized due to remaining differences in data analysis (MD: arithmetic index, VA: geometric index). A baywide index using a geometric mean weighted by river spawning area was finally developed in 1993. More recently, a re-computation of the baywide index using a geometric mean was used to correlate juvenile recruitment to fishery independent monitoring (Woodward 2009).