Fitting and using growth curves.

A technique is presented for fitting and analyzing growth patterns using Gompertz, power, and exponential curves. Data collection involves measuring growth rate as a function of size. This is useful because growth rates at many different sizes can be measured at the same time, which removes the effect of environmental change from the observed growth pattern. Using size instead of age as the independent variable is important because size is usually more closely related to growth rate than is age. The particular technique presented here yields estimates of the variance of the curve parameters so that growth curves for different populations can be compared.