For this very new fishery, those aspects of the species' biology most relevant to its management and continued exploitation are its distributions, abundances and rates of growth. Unfortunately at the start of this project/ we knew none of this information for the NSW stock. As a first step I designed/ completed/ analysed and wrote up for publication a series of manipulative field experiments designed to determine the best sampling strategy for estimating the distributions/ abundances and rates of growth of spanner crabs. These experiments involved estimating the relative abundances of this species in the fishing grounds (10m to 100m depth off the NSW far north coast) using catch per unit of effort data from baited tangle traps. Multifactorial/ orthogonal and nested experimental designs were used to determine the best kind of frame/ mesh-size and ply of net, method of hanging nets and the type of bait to catch the greatest number and widest sizerange of crabs (see Kennelly & Craig/1989 - paper 1 in the attached list). Another paper (Kennelly, 1989 - paper 2) describes similar experiments to determine optimal soak-times/ in addition to applying cost-benefit and analysis of variance techniques to a pilot survey to determine optimal numbers of replicates and sets of replicates. The work reported in these 2 papers resulted in the development of an optimal sampling strategy which was used to determine the relative abundances of spanner crabs of the widest possible size-range.