On some biological, meristic and morphometric studies on the Malabar sole, Cynoglossus semifasciatus Day

Abstract

29 samples of the Malabor Sole Cynoglossus semifasciatus collected from five centres of the west coast were studied statistically for selected biological, meristic and morphometric characters to assess the extent of homogeneity of this fish along the coast, the study being necessitated by some apparent variations noticed at Calicut earlier. Length frequency trends, sex-proportions and maturity trends, all revealed however, a high degree of agreement with the past findings on the species at Calicut by Seshappa and Bhimachar (1955). Counts of various finrays and of the longitudinal and transverse series of scales indicated a somewhat varying but yet similar trend, the Cochin samples being not different also. The morphometric characters studied both by the ratio method and by the regression and Co-variance analysis indicated a similar conclusion. A study of the length-weight relationships again revealed nonsignificant results from the different comparisons among centres though between seasons, there were expectable differences with statistical significance.