Preliminary results on the length-weight relationship of fresh Antarctic krill with weight-at-length based on multiple individuals

Aiming to develop a method to estimate the length-weight relationship for concurrent acoustic monitoring of Antarctic krill biomass, a pilot experiment was undertaken to evaluate the feasibility of measuring the weight of fresh Antarctic krill at sea by scientific observers onboard krill fishing vessel, where multiple individuals of the same length class was weighed together to alleviate the impact of vessel motion on individual mass measurement. Preliminary analysis showed that a reasonable krill length-weight relationship could be obtained by employing a uniform weight-at-length sampling design; the outcomes of a simulation study showed that the effect of weighing multiple individuals together on the final estimates was negligible, implying potential wider applications of this method in the study of basic krill biology. Further work could be aimed to determine suitable sample sizes to obtain appropriate length-weight estimates for different usages.