Study of Morphometric and Meristic Characters on the population stractural Variation of whitefin wolf herring (Chirocentrus nudus Swinson, 1839) in the coasts of the Persian Gulf

In order to investigate the population structure of the whitefin wolf herring (Chirocentrus nudus) by morphometric and meristic characters method in the waters of the north of the Persian Gulf, from the three regions of Abadan, Shif and Bandar Abbas, 20 individual from each station and A total 60 fish was collected by gill net and it was prepared and transferred to the laboratory in May 2019. 29 morphometric traits and 5 meristic traits were measured. The results of the one-way analysis of variance of 12 morphometric characteristics among the samples had a significant difference at the 5% level, which indicates the phenotypic diversity in the whitefin wolf herring of the three studied regions. The results of the discriminant function analysis (DFA) about the morphometric traits showed that the populations of the whitefin wolf herring in Abadan, Shif and Bandar Abbas regions were separated from each other by 91.7%. The results of principal component analysis (PCA) for morphometric traits showed that 9 factors with eigenvalues ​​greater than 1 were selected, which includes 84.56% of the variation of morphometric traits. Based on the Kruskal-Wallis test, among the 5 meristic traits measured, two traits including the number of spines and rays of the dorsal fin and the number of soft rays of the pectoral fin were found to be significantly different at the 5% level (p≤0.05). The distribution diagram based on the first and second components, the dendrogram of the morphometric traits showed that there are at least two different populations of the whitefin wolf herring species in the Persian Gulf.