Discrimination Between Larval and Juvenile Specimens of Euphausia superba from Gut Contents

Based on the change in the allometric relations between the antennular spine and body length in the passage from Furcilia VI to juvenile in Euphausia superba lineal discriminant functions have been constructed to classify damaged specimens, specially those coming from penguin stomachal contents. Body, Telson and antennulars lengths are used. Misclassification probabilities have been calculated on an independent sample resulting reasonably low (3 out of 28 specimens). Body and Telson lengths resulted highly correlated (R=0.95); allowing the use of the method when body length is not available.