Morphological comparison of five populations of Mosul bleak (Alburnus mossulensis) in the Tigris basin using Elliptic Fourier Analysis

The morphological comparison of five populations of Mosul bleak (Alburnus mossulensis Heckel, 1843) was done using Elliptic Fourier analysis. For this porpose a total of 219 specimens were caught from Tigris basin (Gamasiab, Karoon, Kashkan, Khersan and Sepidbarg Rivers) using electrofishing. The fish were photographed from left sides using a digital camera and the outline curve was digitized using TpsDig2 software and resampled to 150 equal distanced landmarks. The outline curveswere converted to a readable file format for EPA analysis using EFAWIN software and EFA analysis was done opting 17 shape harmonics with 2 constants and four coefficients per harmonic and non-shapeddata were removed usin general Procrustes analysis. The principal component analysis (PCA) and Manova/CVA were used for morphological comparison in PAST software. The results showed significant shape differences between populations but Sepidbarg population (p