Morphometric Conversions for 33 Shark Species from the Western North Atlantic Ocean Marine Fisheries Review

This study generates and updates mathematical conversions among body length and weight measurements of sharks commonly encountered in the west-ern North Atlantic Ocean. At the initiation of individual research programs, stan-dardized measurements are determined to meet program objectives, yet these mea-surements often vary among programs and may differ within programs over time. Since length is of vital importance to understanding the basic biology of a species (e.g., growth, length at maturity) and to enforce management regulations based on size, it is necessary to have length-length and length-weight conversions to be able to standardize measurements for individu-al species. We compiled length and weight data on sharks from nine research pro-grams operating in the western North Atlantic Ocean from Canada through the Gulf of Mexico to obtain length-length and length-weight conversions for 27 spe-cies and 3 genera consisting of 6 species. Length-length and length-weight conver-sions are presented for all species using over the body fork length as the indepen-dent variable. This study updates and ex-pands previous conversions with new in-formation.