Meristic and morphometric variations of critically endangered butter catfish, Ompok pabo inhabiting three natural sources

摘要

The present study focuses to examine the meristic and morphometric variations of Ompok pabo from three populations namely Bergobindapur baor (BB), Bhairab River (BhR) and Kopotakho River (KR) in Bangladeshi freshwaters using the landmark-based truss network analysis. Truss protocol used in the present study based on seven general morphometrics and eight landmarks points constructed by interconnecting them to form total 16 truss measurements. Meristic counts were compared among three populations and no significant differences were observed in non-parametric Kruskal Wallis test. Univariate statistics (ANOVA) showed 5 [standard length (SL), post-orbital length (PsOL), maximum body depth (MBD), length of left barbel (LLB) and length of right barbel (LRB)] of seven morphometrics measurement and 8 (2-3, 3-4, 6-7, 2-7, 2-6, 3-6, 3-5, 2-8) of the 16 truss measurements significantly differed to varying degrees (p0.05, p0.01, p0.001) among samples. Cannonical discriminant function analyses were done among the samples and the populations were fully separated. In case of both morphometric and truss measurements, the first and second discriminant function (DF) accounted for 76.3% and 23.7% respectively in group variability explaining 100% of the total among group variability. A dendrogram was drawn for the three populations of BB, BhR and KR based on the morphometric and truss measurements where two clusters were mainly formed in which BB and BhR formed one cluster and KR formed a separate cluster. The preliminary information derived from the present study may be useful to manage and conserve of O. pabo populations in three aforementioned ecological niches.