A survey on Luciobarbus mystaceus (Pallas, 1814) by geometric morphometric methods depend on gender, age and season variations

This study is made to find out the variations of the outer body morphology of Luciobarbus mystaceus (Pallas, 1814) belonging Cyprinidae family that lived in Tigris river system between January 2015 and December 2015 with geometric morphometric methods depending on gender, age and season. After being caught with fishnet having different meshes and brought to the laboratory, in total 58 (21♀♀, 37♂♂) L. mystaceus samples were photographed from lateral by Sony digital camera. On the basis of photography, 12 landmarks were taken with tpsDig ver. 2.26 and later on the database that contains this landmark coordinates were analyzed by Principal component analysis (PCA), Canonical Variation Analysis) and Distribution Analysis (DA) with MorphoJ ver. 1.06d program. In the CV analysis between age groups; in terms of Mahalanobis distance, VI age group statistically has different forms in comparison with III, IV and V age groups. III-V age groups also statistically have different forms in comparison with other groups except VII and VI age groups. In the seasonal CV analysis, winter group statistically has different forms in comparison with autumn, summer and spring groups in terms of Mahalanobis distance. In CVA Mahalanobis distance between the sexes is 2.0 and the permutation value depending on this; p<0.0001. The difference is statistically significant and the distribution between males and females is significant.