Relative growth stages of an important sciaenid fish from the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean: the striped croaker Cynoscion reticulatus

Cynoscion reticulatus has been a significant resource in the Mexican Pacific for over 20 years. However, it lacks management measures due to a lack of biological-fishery information. For this reason, this study aimed to analyze the relative growth using a multimodel approach to facilitate and increase the accuracy of using structured models to estimate biomass. Therefore, three models were compared to determine which best describes the species' ontogeny. The results showed that a broken line model can aptly describe the species' relative growth, as it identifies the point of change in the growth trend. It pinpointed the same relative growth pattern in both sexes; in males, the growth switched from positive allometric to negative allometric after 34.2 cm total length (TL), whereas in females, it occurred after 33.3 cm TL. This growth pattern was linked to the species' reproductive physiology. The information gathered is crucial for fisheries assessment, as it can serve as input data in dynamic models of low or high complexity, offering swiftly obtained information for stock evaluation, allowing the determination of a resource's status and estimating biomass to manage target species appropriately.