Structure of supporting elements in the dorsal fin of percid fishes.

The dorsal fin is one of the most varied swimming structures in Acanthomorpha, the spiny-finned fishes. This fin can be present as a single contiguous structure supported by bony spines and soft lepidotrichia, or it may be divided into an anterior, spiny dorsal fin and a posterior, soft dorsal fin. The freshwater fish family Percidae exhibits especially great variation in dorsal fin spacing, including fishes with separated fins of varying gap length and fishes with contiguous fins. We hypothesized that fishes with separated dorsal fins, especially those with large gaps between fins, would have stiffened fin elements at the leading edge of the soft dorsal fin to resist hydrodynamic loading during locomotion. For 10 percid species, we measured the spacing between dorsal fins and calculated the second moment of area of selected spines and lepidotrichia from museum specimens. There was no significant relationship between the spacing between dorsal fins and the second moment of area of the leading edge of the soft dorsal fin.