Correlation analysis of gender and morphology of Cyclina sinensis in the reproductive season

Based on 11 morphological characters of Cyclina sinensis,three multivariation analysis methods(discriminant,principal component,and cluster analysis) were used to investigate the correlation of genderwith morphology between male and female C.sinensis populations collected from GY(Ganyu stock in Lianyungang) in Sept.2008 and May 2009 and Haikou(in Hainan island) in May 2009.The male and female discriminant functions were constructed for the four populations(the three individual population and their combination into one population).The total discriminant accuracy was low(56.25%~71.01%) with no sig-nificant difference(P0.05) between male and female in the morphological variations.By principal compo-nent analysis,three principal components were constructed,and the value of cumulative contributory ratio was 58.11%~75.64% which indicated several separate morphological factors could not describe the variation from the male and the female.The cluster analysis indicated that the morphological distance of the clam between the male and the female from the same population was shorter than that from different population.Therefore,our three multivariate analysis showed there were no significant correlation between morphology and gender.