Two Methods Utilizing Fish and Otolith Morphological Measurements for Age Determination of Baltic Flounder (Platichthys flesus)

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The prevailing method for age determination of Baltic flounder (Platichthys flesus) involves counting annual growth rings in otoliths. However, this method is both time-consuming and subject to error and subjective uncertainty. During the last decade, there has therefore been renewed interest in alternative methods employing statistical decomposition of the sample distributions of fish and otolith linear sizes and weights (Salgado-Ugarte et al. 2000, Drevs and Raid 2010), exploiting functional relationships between these variables and age (Pilling et al. 2003; Pino et al 2003; Cardinale and Arrhenius 2004), or combining these two approaches (Cardinale et al. 2000).