Morphological Characteristics of Squaretail Mullet Ellochelon vaigiensis (Quoy and Gaimard 1825), a Rare Mugil Species C
- PDF / 6,817,720 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 68 Downloads / 170 Views
Morphological Characteristics of Squaretail Mullet Ellochelon vaigiensis (Quoy and Gaimard 1825), a Rare Mugil Species Collected from the Iranian Waters of the Persian Gulf (Teleostei: Mugiliformes) Azad Teimori 1
&
Majid Askari Hesni 1
Received: 30 December 2019 / Revised: 3 May 2020 / # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Detailed morphological information is provided for the Squaretail Mullet Ellochelon vaigiensis (Quoy and Gaimard 1825) from the Iranian waters of the Persian Gulf. The general morphology, saccular otolith, the urohyal bone morphology, and the scale morphology were described for this species. Approximately 21 years ago, the occurrence of E. vaigiensis was reported from the coastal waters of the Hormuzgan Province in the Persian Gulf (Southern Iran), based on only a single specimen, and since that only a few studies have addressed its occurrence from this region. Re-detection of E. vaigiensis in this study provided detailed data on its morphological characteristics from this region. Keywords Morphology . Taxonomy . Biodiversity . Marine fish
Introduction Species identification and the study of their distribution is an important issue in conservation planning and management. It is particularly important in the case where there is only a little information available on the distribution and classification of a certain taxon. The family Mugilidae comprises fishes that are not easy to identify and to discriminate by considering only their general morphological features. For example, there is a close overlap in the numbers of dorsal and anal fin spines and ray counts within the family (Whitfield et al. 2012). Nevertheless, discrimination of the species in mullets fish is very important for the local fisheries management as well as trophic studies (Bustos et al. 2012). Until date, six mullet species have been recorded from the Iranian waters, comprising two exotic species from the Caspian Sea basin (Chelon auratus and C. saliens), two native species from the freshwater systems of Southern Iran (Mugil cephalus and Planiliza abu), and two species from brackish or marine waters (Ellochelon vaigiensis and C. subviridis) (Abdoli 2000; Abdoli and Naderi 2009).
* Azad Teimori [email protected] 1
Department of Biology, Faculty of Sciences, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran
Different aspects of mullet fishes have been extensively studied within the Iranian water basins except for E. vaigiensis, which has been only poorly investigated (Ardalan et al. 2012; Askary Sary et al. 2012; Behrooz et al. 2014; Coad 2017; Salehi Ranjbar et al. 2016). Originally, E. vaigiensis is described from Waigeo, Indonesia (Quoy and Gaimard 1824–1825). It was previously in the genus Liza but later was placed in Ellochelon (Randall 1995). Ellochelon vaigiensis is distributed widely from the Indo-Pacific region, including the Red Sea and East Africa to the Tuamoto Islands, north to southern Japan, south to southern Great Barrier Reef, and New Caledonia (Harrison and Senou 1999). However, only a few studi
Data Loading...
