Morphometric, meristic and landmark-based analysis of a rare croaking gourami, Trichopsis vittata

LANDMARK-BASED ANALYSIS OF T. VITTATA

Abstract

The truss network systems was constructed with the help of landmark points along with the morphometric and meristic characteristics to evaluate the population status of rare croaking gourami, Trichopsis vittata. A total of 25 fish specimens were collected from three selected locations of the Meghna river of Bangladesh during March, 2014. All the data of the studied characteristics were obtained using the digital photograph of the samples which were analyzed through Klonk image measurement software. Nine morphometric and six meristic characters were analyzed along with thirty truss network measurements. Non parametric Kruskal-Wallis test was applied for comparing meristic counts and no significant differences were observed among the groups. Univariate statistics (ANOVA) showed no significant difference among three groups. For both morphometric and landmark measurements the first discriminant function (DF) accounted for 72.1% and 78.2% and the second DF accounted for 27.9% and 21.8%, respectively of the among group variability. With morphometric measurements 87.5% of group 1, 66.7% of group 2 and 75% of group 3 samples were correctly classified. As the truss network system revealed, all the samples were clearly separated from each other in the discriminant space.