I emphasize that these results are preliminary.

Tag recapture are accumulating as we speak, and more are expected in the next year.

The results clearly indicate the yellowfin and bigeye exploit the Cross Seamount and the other offshore habitat in different ways. Bigeye show higher “fidelity” to the Cross site than yellowfin as indicated by the lower emigration rate to other areas (T) and a lower “mortality” (M). Interestingly they appear also to be less vulnerable to the gear the yellowfin.

The situation seems reversed for the other recapture sites , “Elsewhere”. This “area” can be interpreted as the pool of resident fish somewhere near Hawaii. It is larger than the seamount, but space is not explicitly included in this sort of gross t ransfer model so it is impossible to be precise about the area.

In general, both the harvest- ratio estimates and the half-life estimates seem higher than expected. The estimates need examination in more detail. The denominator of the harvest ratio is the rate of loss from the population on one area and does not include immigration for the other area.