Fish Morphology - Science topic

Respected Miriam Leah Zelditch , thank you so much for such detailed guidance. I will surely seek for guidance from your recommended books and literature. i am confused about many things that would be resolved. Yes, I am learning many things with the help of literature and merciful scientists like you, as these techniques haven't been used in our country yet. Thank you again for your support and guidance.

In my opinion this book is quite good:

"The Laboratory Fish"

Gary K Ostrander

If, and it seems so, these analyzes are post-mortem, you can fix the fish and stain the scales or the pores. There is a variety of stains that you can use, protocols are fairly simple so that should not be a problem. In this way, you should be able to determine the scales number and position easier. Hope that helps.

Thanks Aleks!

If you are asking how to construct a phylogenetic tree using fish morphology and meristic characters, then you are not talking about "classical taxonomy".

You have already received several comprehensive and helpful suggestions and advise from four colleagues. You have then been informed about different methods that you may use. However, all of those programs work with a matrix that you will have to build by yourself and this is a most difficult part because, and depending on the list of characters that you have and of their coding, the selected outgroup(s) to polarize characters, and also the composition of the selected ingroup, the results may be different.  

It varies within species. It is partly heritable, and partly dependent on a range of environmental factors during development affecting developmental rates, e.g. temperature. Meristic differences between populations of the same species can depend on different temperatures in the water when they grow up. If you search for "meristic variation" on Google Scholar you will find many papers on this.

Take the length in cm and weight in gm. Find the log values of both.Draw a scatter diagram and add the trend line . Find the extreme outliers and remove it. Then insert the trend line and get the regression equation. Simple excel you can do this

First ,quick and dirty aproximation: On pages 88 and 90 of Horacio´s link (Fishery yearbook 2013 the last one) you will find agregated figures for Sinaloa (Mazatlan port) and Sonora (Guaymas port) states in México. The total fishery production for Sinaloa was 328,586 tons for that year (Peaking to 339,848 tons in 2007 of a 10 year time series). Sonora landings were the same year 675,398 tons (with a peak in 2009 of 808,380 tons). Sinaloa was the second place in landings and first in value in the country while Sonora was the first one in Landings and second in value that year (2013). If Mazatlan and Guaymas are the most important ports in both states, and the historical Sinaloa peak (2007) is lower that year 2013 Sonora production you can conclude by analogy that Guaymas is by far more important than Mazatlan!!!...Aparently there is no port comparative figure on landings on the yearbook. I will try to find hard data conclusisive evidence!!!! Cheers!!!

Antonio

Dear Imen 

Iwish this link is useful

hi, here some publications you may interest.

There is a vast literature on this subject, including several textbooks. Try searching on BKD, bacterial kidney disease, or just use appropriate search terms in google scholar. 

https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/19892296976 

As mentioned earlier, the TPS software suite very useful and user-friendly in placing landmarks and performing basic analyses. http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/morph/

My former adviser has also worked on computer-based species identification. This may be of interest to you.

Best of luck with your work

Radu V. (2005)

You should know the salt tolerance tendency of selected fish. freshwater stenohaline fish can't bear such level of salt and ofcourse excess of everything is bad! before starting experiment on these creatures you must know and read enough literature for successful output. 

Your welcome sir. I've just sent the photos here.

The AMNH digital library web page was working for me yesterday, but is currently not responding, probably due to maintenance works.

Please try again tomorrow -- it should work for you then.

I tried to attach the paper here, but this did not work either (it has 113 MB!). Sorry for the inconvenience. If you don't manage to retrieve the paper in the next few days, please contact me again and we will find a way to get you the pdf.

-Ron

Hi Jeremiah,

This paper on the sea bass may be of interest to you.

One of the co-authors Marudio Kentouri is on RG, you may try to contact her.

Cheers,

Luis

Accuracy of Using Scales and Cleithra for Aging Northern Pike from an Oligotrophic Ontario Lake

Arnold O. Laine , Walter T. Momot , Philip A. Ryan

North American Journal of Fisheries Management

Vol. 11, Iss. 2, 1991

To estimates the surface and perimeter of an otolith, you can use imageJ (https://imagej.nih.gov/ij/) that is an open source free software that do it easily. Just bear in mind that due to the irregular shape of otolith from som species, you really have to take care of the position of the otolith. It is also very useful to use ratio when looking at relationship between otolith size and total lenght of a fish. Some more sophisticate software linked to numerical microscope (Keyance for example) aloow you to reconstruct a 3D image of your otolith where you can do every kind of measure you want afterward.

McEachran & Capapé in Whitehead et al. (1984: 198) give the morphological differences as follows:

a) Membraneous fold on top of tail behind spine; distance between fifth gill-slits less than 1/2 their distance from mouth; 5 bulbous papillae on floor of mouth . . . Dasyatis pastinaca

b) A ridge on top of tail behind spine; distance between fifth gill-slits more than 1/2 of their distance from mouth; 3 filamentous papillae on floor of mouth  . . . Dasyatis tortonesei

References:

Capapé, C. 1975. Sélaciens nouveaux et rares le long des côtes tunisiennes. Premières observations biologiques. Archives de l'Institut Pasteur de Tunis 52 (1-2) (for Mar.-June 1975): 107-128.

Whitehead, P. J. P., M.-L. Bauchot, J.-C. Hureau, J. G. Nielsen and E. Tortonese 1984. Fishes of the North-eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Vol. 1. UNESCO, Paris: 1-510.

Dear Christopher, thank you for your kindness reply.

Charles,

Saltwater or freshwater? I assume you have looked in Stanley Olsen (1968), who has the bones and scales of a few common types of fish found at archaeological sites in the U.S.

I know that when we had a large collection of fish scales from an archaeological site in the coastal zone of south Louisiana our archaeozoologist used the comparative faunal collection at Tulane University to identify them. I recently read that either the University of North Carolina or maybe the University of South Carolina had a comparative collection too.

Stanley Olsen. 1968. Fish, Amphibian and Reptile Remains from Archaeological Sites. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 56, No. 2. Harvard University, Cambridge.

Richard Daniels. 1996. Guide to the Identification of Scales of the Inland Fishes of Northeastern North America. New York State Museum Bulletin 488.

Check out the reference (Page 44 of the attached pdf).

Rzhanov, Yuri, and George Cutter. "StereoMeasure and StereoFeatures: measuring fish and reconstructing scenes using underwater stereo photographs." National Marine Fisheries Service, Seattle, Washington, NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-F/SPO-121 (2010).

There are also other documents in this report which may interest you.

You may also wish to consult the following paper:

Weber, C. , R. Covain and S. Fisch-Muller 2012: Identity of Hypostomus plecostomus (Linnaeus, 1758), with an overview of Hypostomus species from the Guianas (Teleostei: Siluriformes: Loricariidae). Cybium v. 36 (no. 1): 195-227.

2.6 is very high and I would be very skeptical of whichever source you drew that from. The "standard" value for teleosts is 1.5. (Try a Google search for "Beverton-Holt life history invariants". There is a substantial modern literature.) Many species have other values of M/K but it should be possible to suggest reasons (such as protogynous hermaphroditism) for why a particular species differs. Estimating K is possible (though it is often very hard to get a precise value) but estimating M is rarely practical, so empirical confirmation of M/K is not often an available option.

Your identification as Istigobius ornatus (Rüppell 1830) (family GOBIIDAE) is correct.

You may consult the revision of Istigobius by Murdy & Hoese (1985), who recorded the species from Sri Lanka, for further information:

Murdy, E. O. and D. F. Hoese 1985

Revision of the gobiid fish genus Istigobius. Indo-Pacific Fishes No. 4: 1-41, Pls. 1-3.

Other species of the genus in Sri Lanka are Istigobius decoratus and I. goldmanni. Neither of these has several rows of dark streaks above the lateral line.

You are correct, this is rather Neoglyphidodon bonang, which has a single blue line on the head, and an additional small blue spot dorsally on the caudal peduncle.

There are no studies reporting a hybridisation of Trachurus trachurus and T. trecae  known to me. If you are aware of any hybrids, this would be worth publishing.

Hi Dan and Caleb,

of course, happy to help. Well, the easy answer is - we have no clue. We do not know for sure whether and what fishes feel. It is among the hardest thing to answer because we are humans not fish. Obviously, one can, as many people did, nociceptive reactions, physiology, stress, cognition, intelligence and whatever concepts suits, but we have no clue what that means emotionally even if fishes show reactions to noxious stimuli. The field is wide open, a really interesting paper you should read is the paper by Key (2015), see here http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10539-014-9469-4#page-1

Another one really interesting is on hooked cod, showing the cod show no reaction whatsoever when hooked without pulling the line, see here http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0100150 Maybe cod even felt something, but they showed no reaction, not even a stress response different from the controls.

Bottom line, we do not even know for small fishes and overall only for a handful of model species whether nociceptive responses are pain, let along for large-bodied species. If at all, I would assume that for evolutionary reasons top predators should be less sensitive than omnivorous fishes.What we know, however, is that struggeling on the hook might be more pronounced in larger fishes, hence stress responses might be more expressed, which in turn might render larger fishes less able to cope with angling-induced stress, see this paper http://fishlab.nres.illinois.edu/Reprints/Gingerich_et_al_Size_2012.pdf

I know this was not satisfactory, but honestly we have no clue about the emotional system of fish.

Robert

No, in fact I would suggest the simple length-at-observed age observations would be superior to back-calculations. One problem with back-calculations is that it over-emphasizes older fish because they will have more back-calculated lengths at ages. This can be handled statistically using mixed effects models, but these models are inherently more complex and harder to explain to non-statistical persons. Another problem with back-calcs relates to issues arising from Lee's and Reverse Lee's phenomenon (not fixed by using observed ages, but effect potentially lessened). So, bottom line is don't feel the need to back-calculate if you have a good sample size of observed lengths at age.

Coulson et al 2011 (DNA barcoding of Canada’s skates, Molecular Ecology Resources (2011) 11, 968–978) noted that here was a lack of genetic differences between Amblyraja hyperborea and Amblyraja jenseni. However, while very similar in appearance, morphology and most meristics, upper jaw tooth count is different between these "sibling" species. They also appear to have different growth and maturity and I am presently examining that aspect. They are largely geographically separate and what we may be observing is a recent separation. I agree that DNA bar coding is a useful tool but is not in itself definitive in defining species.

I vaguely remember that I heard some theories about Galeaspida or Osteostraci possibly having an electrogenetic sense.

But the only "reference" I can give you at the moment is just the page about Osteostraci on the tree of life project page:

I (or you) will have to dive more deeply into the literature aboput them to get some usefull, quoteable references.

I have seen them in wild chum salmon that were reared in a hatchery.

Try here: http://research.calacademy.org/redirect?url=http://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/Ichthyology/catalog/fishcatmain.asp

It seems the type material for these species are unknown.

Cheers

Do you mean a field guide? If so, I highly recommend 'Reef Fish Identification: Florida, Caribbean, Bahamas' by Paul Humann and Ned Deloach.

Sundeep,

Zebrafish are physostomous, meaning they have a connection from their swim bladder to their mouth. Larve inflate their swim bladder by taking a gulp of air from the air-water interface. If you keep larve in a container and remove the air-water interface (fill it all the way up and put the lid on tight), they can't inflate their swim bladder. If there is even a small air pocket they will find it and inflate.

Hope that helps,

Dan