Calculation of the Average Age of Sexual Maturity in Marine Mammals

Abstract

The average age of sexual maturity and first pregnancy are important criteria in evaluating the status of a population. However, the estimation procedure for these statistics should be sensitive to the different distributions of age-specific reproductive data and should also incorporate a variance estimate to facilitate comparisons between populations. The described procedure lends itself well to age-specific data and should be useful in discerning differences between populations of [Formula: see text] or more, if a sample of at least 25 is available for each age-class. Key words: reproduction, marine mammals, sexual maturity