This research seeks to obtain a comprehensive and innovative set of key measurements on individual fish larvae that will fully characterize the animal's size-specific growth, as well as the response of these measures to different food levels. These values will change with the animal's development, and so the size-related changes in larval physiology and ecology must be characterized and understood if their role in population processes is to be known. The typical values of the measurements, their observed distributions and variability, and the strength of their relation ship to one another, will be evaluated. The underlying goals for the work are: 1) to derive baseline information on the size-specific development patterns in individual marine fish larvae that are expected to be important in field recruitment process studies, and 2) to intercompare this set of condition indices to learn the strength of the relationships among them, and what their relative value would be for indicating overall animal condition and predicting continued survival.
