Modeling of Growth Depensation of Geoduck ClamPanopea globosaBased on a Multimodel Inference Approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT Growth variability has been a common feature within different Panopea species, affecting the accurate estimation of growth parameters and their theoretical trajectories. Recently, the interest in solving this problem has increased; however, the methods used for individual growth modeling of Panopea spp. have not been effective in identifying the variability within the shell length-at-age composition. In the current study, a novel approach is proposed to analyze the effect of shell length-at-age variability on the individual growth and growth parameters of Panopea globosa. The shell length-at-age data were fitted to six candidate growth models: von Bertalanffy, Gompertz, Johnson, Logistic, Generalized von Bertalanffy growth model (GVBGM), and Richards using a negative log-likelihood function. The variance for each age observed () in the population was estimated for each growth model. The best candidate growth model was selected based on corrected Akaike information criterion (AICc). The results in...