Target Strength Measurements of Live Golden Cuttlefish Sepia esculenta at 70 and 120 kHz

Cuttlefish Sepia esculenta are commercially important in Korea. Assessments of their biomass currently depend on fishery-landings data, which may be biased. Towards fishery-independent acoustic surveys of cuttlefish, target strength (TS) measurements at 70 and 120 kHz were made of 23 live cuttlefish, in early May 2010. The fish were caught by traps in the inshore waters around Geojedo, Korea. The TS were measured using split-beam echosounders (Simrad ES60 and EY500, respectively). The cuttlefish mantle lengths (L) ranged from 15.6 to 23.5 cm (mean L=17.8 cm) and their masses (W) ranged from 335 to 1020 g (mean W=556.1 g). Their mean TS values at 70 and 120 kHz were -33.01 dB (std=1.39 dB) and -31.76 dB (std=2.15 dB), respectively. The mean TS at 70 kHz was 0.17 dB higher than the TS-length relationship resulting from a least-squares fit to the data ($TS=24.67{\log}_{10}L(cm)-64.03$, $r^2$ = 0.52, N=23). The mean TS at 120 kHz was 0.45 dB higher than the fitted TS-length relationship ($TS=40.59{\log}_{10}L(cm)-82.96$, $r^2$ = 0.58, N=23). The differences between the mean TS values and an equation regressed from all of the TS measurements at both frequencies ($TS=24.92{\log}_{10}L(cm)-4.92{\log}_{10}{\lambda}(m)-22.82$, $r^2$ = 0.86, N=46) was 0.22 dB at 70 kHz and 0.31 dB at 120 kHz, respectively.