Study of Morphological Variation in Different Populations of Rainbow Sardines (Clupeidaae:, Dussomieria acuta) in the Persian Gulf and Oman Sea

Inroduction & Sardines and other Microfilidae have very important ecological role in marine ecosystems because they are first consumers in marine food chain Therefore there is a disturbance in the food chain in the marine environment and possibly a decrease in the population of fishes such as tuna. There are 10 species of Clupeidae in the Gulf and the Sea of Oman, among which genus Sardinella is dominant. Considering the significant climatic differences between the Persian Gulf and the Oman Sea, the present study was conducted to investigate the possible morphological variation and to create subpopulations in the distribution area of rainbow sardine species..
Material and During winter 90 and spring 91, 64 rainbow sardines were collected from Jask (Oman Sea) and Lengh (Persian Gulf) ports .Morphological traits were measured and recorded with 0.01 mm precision and digital scale with accuracy of 0.001 g. Data were analyzed by multivariate analysis of MANOVA, PCA main variables test and standard separation test using SPSS software.
Morphological analysis and variance analysis showed a significant cline at the level of P