Length-Weight Relationships for 15 Coral Reef Fish Species from the Northern Line Islands1

Length-weight relationships (LWR) are valuable for fisheries stock assessments yet are often sparsely available for coral reef fishes. This study describes the LWR for 15 species of coral reef fish spanning seven families from the Northern Line Islands, a geographically remote and historically understudied area of the central Pacific. Specimens were collected across multiple field campaigns from 2006 to 2011, and the LWR were calculated using the linear regression of the log-transformed total length (TL, 0.1 cm precision) and weight (W, 0.01 g precision) data. Many of these species come from popular food fish families and contribute to large proportions of total reef fish biomass. We found that all but one of the Bayesian point estimates fell outside of the 95% confidence interval for our empirically derived LWR, which underscores the importance of studying under-sampled geographies.