Investigations on the number of trials required for statistical comparison of fishing gears

The number of fishing trials required for comparing the efficiency of fishing gears was investigated. A unique solution to this problem did not appear to exist because of the heterogeneity of the experimental material. Sequential experimentation and analysis have been found to be a practical approach to this problem. By this, the experiment can be terminated almost after 35 days fishing for catches with standard error per unit as per cent of the mean about 30% or less (after logarithmic transformation). For data with mean catches less than 1.5 kg analysis of variance approach does not appear to be meaningful.