To evaluate growth, body length was examined preferentially to body mass, since the fish were fed every 3 h and rarely had an empty gut, so growth estimates from body mass measurements would have been biased to variable extents depending on food intake and thus presumably on treatment. Fish wet body mass (WM) was backcalculated from the fish's total length (TL) with a mass-to-size model for larvae of P. hypophthalmus with empty guts (E. Baras, unpublished data), i.e. Log WM=176.0−[882.8 Log(TL)]+[1737.3 log(TL)2]− [1684.4 Log(TL)3]+[808.9 Log(TL)4])−[154.1 Log(TL)5]. The model is unusually complex for a mass-to-size relationship in fish, but it accurately depicts the various stages of allometric growth that occur
throughout the larval stages of P. hypophthalmus (here from 0.9 to 80 mg WM, R2N0.99, df=350).