Serbest Bilici¹*, Muhammed Yaşar Dörtbudak², Alaettin Kaya³, Tarık Çiçek⁴ and Erhan Ünlü⁴

¹Department of Animal Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Şırnak University, Şırnak, Türkiye
²Department of Fisheries and Diseases, Faculty of Veterinary, Harran University, Şanlıurfa, Türkiye
³Department of Basic Science, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine Faculty, Dicle University, Diyarbakır, Türkiye
⁴Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Dicle University, Diyarbakır, Türkiye

*Corresponding Author: Serbest Bilici, Department of Animal Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Şırnak University, Şırnak, Türkiye.

Received: September 02, 2024; Published: September 26, 2024

Abstract

In this study, individuals of Carassius gibelio (Bloch, 1782) comprising 85 females and 34 males were collected from the Tigris River in Şırnak, Turkey. The size and shape of the scales were analyzed separately using 2D geometric morphometric methods, with scale size treated as the center size. Procrustes ANOVA indicated significant differences between the groups in both size (center size) and shape. Scale size increased with age among the age groups, while seasonal analysis revealed that autumn samples exhibited the largest scale size, whereas summer samples had the smallest. Female specimens were generally larger than their male counterparts. In the principal component (PC) analysis based on gender, the first two principal components (PC1 and PC2) accounted for 59.8% of the total variance, contributing 42.7% and 17.1%, respectively. When analyzing by age, PC1 and PC2 explained 57.7% of the variance, with contributions of 41.2% and 16.5%, respectively. Seasonal PC analysis showed that PC1 and PC2 accounted for 59.3% of the total variance, with 42.7% and 16.6% contributions, respectively. Canonical Variate Analysis (CVA) for gender demonstrated a significant difference between the two genders. In the seasonal CVA, significant differences were observed among the autumn-summer, summer-spring, and spring-winter group comparisons. For age groups, significant differences were found between age groups 2-5, 2-6, and 2-7 as well as between 3-5 and 3-6; however, the differences among the other age groups were not statistically significant. In the shape analysis through Discriminant Function (DF) analysis, the female individuals exhibited larger dorso-ventral scale dimensions, with the difference reaching significance according to both parametric and permutation p-values for T2.

 Key words: Cyprinidae; Geometric Morphometrics; Landmark Analysis; Scale Shape; Turkey

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Citation

Citation: Serbest Bilici., et al. “Gender, Age and Seasonal Variation in Scale Characteristics of Carassius Gibelio (Bloch, 1782) from the Tigris River, Turkey: A Geometric Morphometric Study". Acta Scientific Veterinary Sciences 6.10 (2024): 22-31.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2024 Serbest Bilici., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.