Morphological Variations of Coilia ectenes in Different Lakes

Using the multivariate morphometrics,the morphological variations were investigated among three geographical populations of Coilia ectenes,including the population from Taihu Lake,Hongzehu Lake,and Nansihu Lake.Cluster analysis showed that the morphological characters were similar between the populations of Hongzehu Lake and Nansihu Lake,but quite different of the Taihu Lake population,thus,formed two independent clades.The principal component analysis showed that the three populations shared some morphological characters,but there were distinct differences between the population in Taihu Lake and the other lakes.A toltal of 8 principal components were constructed,the cumulative contribution of this first three principal component was 52.5%.Using the eight variances,three discriminant functions for those three populations were constructed,and the results showed that the prediction accuracy was 80.6%.