There are generally two sources of data for fisheries stock assessment:fishery-dependent and -independent data. The former involves data collected on commercial fishing vessels by fisheryman, while the latter requires routine surveys by researchers that are time-consuming and expensive. Fishery-dependent data is easier to obtain, but there may be problems with regard to its representativeness. This study used (a species of mantis shrimp found in the Western Pacific) as an example to compare the performance of fishery-dependent and -independent data in the parameter estimation of the von Bertalanffy growth equation. With the decline of fishery resources in recent years, has become an important fishery species in China's coastal areas. At present, the research on the biology of is not systematic and this restricts the scientific evaluation and management of fishery resources. Bootstrap re-sampling was used to establish the same sample size. Both types of data were collected from the coast of Shandong province using a 220 kW single-trawling vessel with a bottom trawl of 1380 mesh×4.67 cm (height 7.53 m and width 15 m when deployed). The growth parameters were estimated using a length-frequency method, Electronic Length Frequency Analysis (ELEFAN). Our results showed that the asymptotic body length () estimated using fishery-independent data were 193.27 mm and 0.62, respectively, whereas the estimated by fish-ery-dependent data were 171.63 mm and 0.66, respectively. Nonparametric tests indicated that the three parame ters, s) of were significantly different between the estimates obtained from the two sampling methods. The results suggest that fishery-dependent data may reflect the growth pattern to a certain extent, i.e., the estimates of are close to the results obtained using fishery-independent data, but there is a large error in estimating . Therefore, the estimation of growth characteristics should rely on fishery-independent data for , whereas fishery-dependent data can be used as auxiliary information.