ABSTRACT
The relationship between catch or catch per unit effort and either cumulative catch or cumulative effort can be exploited to estimate the initial abundance for populations that experience enough fishing that the catch of fish declines with successive catches. Two families of methods are commonly used to estimate absolute abundance – capture-recapture and depletion/removal methods. The Leslie and DeLury methods are based on the following assumptions related to the fish and fishery. The Leslie method assumes that the catches remove more than 2% of the population. The population is physically and demographically closed and catchability is constant over the period of removals, all fish are equally vulnerable to the method of capture and the units of effort are independent. The Leslie method is illustrated with removals of age-0 Largemouth Bass from stands of Eurasian Watermilfoil in Lake Guntersville.
