Age determination in crustaceans: a review

Abstract

Crustaceans, a commercially important class of arthropods in fisheries and aquaculture, represent a major worldwide food component for human consumption. Recently, growing interest regarding the ageing and longevity of crustaceans has led to advancement in the field of age determination methods, including the use of lipofuscin and growth band counts, veering from the classic approach of size modal analysis. This manuscript provides a comprehensive overview of literature published between 1990 and 2016 on popular age determination methods (length–frequency analysis, lipofuscin analysis, and growth band counts) applied to five main crustacean taxa (shrimp, krill, crayfish, crabs and lobsters). Of the 231 studies examined, 83% used length–frequency analysis, 13% used lipofuscin and 4% used growth bands. Validation, a necessary step to support results provided by age estimation studies, was included in 71% and 56% of the reviewed published papers that used lipofuscin and growth band counts, respectively. So far, growth band counts have been the only direct method of determining crustacean age. This method requires validation in all species before routine application in stock assessment and/or conservation purposes.