Morphometric Characteristics of Luciobarbusmascarensis and L. lanigarensis (teleostei: cyprinidae) in western Algeria

Abstract

A total of 81 samples captured between November 2017 to September 2019 were morphometrically analyzed as part of this study. In this latter we tried to compare between the population of the dam (artificial environment) and the population of the river (natural environment) in two watersheds for two different species of Luciobarbus in western Algeria. Sites A (natural) and B (artificial) are located at almost the same altitude (285-571 m) whereas sites C (artificial) and D (natural) are located in two different altitudes (285-571 m) and (1078-1821 m) respectively. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) was carried out to test the significance of the variations of each morphometric character between the 4 populations (A, B, C and D). The values of all the external morphometric parameters were the highest in the population of the Boughrara dam followed by El-hammam river and Bouhanifia dam while the population of Chouly river showed the lowest morphometric measurements. The mean of total length (TL) and weight (Weight), for example, of the Boughrara dam were the largest of the four populations (33.03 ± 2.02 cm and 474.46 ± 116.76 g respectively) while those of the river Chouly were the smallest (15.44 ± 1.23 cm and 55.55 ± 13.01 respectively). The sex ratio analysis was performed by studying the overall sex ratio. Females were more abundant than males (1: 1.7). The graphical representation of Quantitative Variables by PCA showed that the morphometric variables are all positively correlated with each other by quite different rates. The Shannon and Weaver index was calculated from the different characters in the four regions studied: A, B, C and D. The region of site B (Bouhanifia dam) had the highest average diversity index with 0.92, followed by the region of site A (El-hammam river) (0.88). The lowest mean value was found in site C (Chouly river) (0.29).