Preliminary biological study on morphology of Sillago sinica populations

The morphological differences among three populations of Sillago sinica,from Dongying,Qingdao and Wenzhou were studied in the present paper,based on multivariate statistical analysis.17 traditional morphological characters and 18 truss morphological characters of 69 specimens were measured.No significant difference was found on meristic characters of S.sinica among the three populations.The result of one-way ANOVA indicates that 17 and 14 morphological parameters are significantly different between the populations of Dongying and Qingdao and the populations of Dongying and Wenzhou respectively.However,only 6 morphological parameters are found to be significantly different between the populations of Qingdao and Wenzhou.No distinct groups that correspond to the sampling locations are found in cluster analysis.Discriminant analysis of 27 morphological parameters shows that there are extremely significant differences among the three populations of S.sinica(P0.01) with the discriminant accuracy reaching 97.1%.Principal component analysis separates the population of Dongying from the other two populations.The present paper offers morphological basis for further studies of population analysis of S.sinica.