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ABSTRACT
Length-weight relationship (LWRs) of two goat fish species of family Mullidae (Teleostei: Perciformes), namely Cinnabar goatfish, Parupeneus heptacanthus (Lacepede, 1802) and Yellowstripe goatfish, Upeneus moluccensis (Bleeker, 1855) was studied from major fishing harbor along the Tuticorin (Lat. 8°47' 26" N, Long. 78°10' 07" E) coast of Gulf of Mannar were described in this paper. A fortnightly mode of collection was done at monthly from June 2016 to November 2017 from trawl landings operated along the Tuticorin waters. The present study estimated b value ranges from 2.923 to 3.223 for the two species. The results pointed out that P.heptacanthus and U.moluccensis species has shown negative allometric growth pattern and positive allometric growth pattern respectively. Length-weight relationship showed good fit with r2 values varying from 0.955 to 0.985. In addition to information on LWR, new maximum length range of U.moluccensis species was reported.
Keywords: Goat fish, Cinnabar goatfish, Yellowstripe goat fish, Length-weight relationship, Allometric growth.
INTRODUCTION
The goatfishes are commercially important demersal fish group belonging to the Family Mullidae (Sabrah and Ganainy, 2009) and are broadly distributed in estuaries and shallow coastal water in the Indo-Pacific Region (Barman and Misra, 2007). This family comprise of about 6 genera belonging to 88 species in 2 sub-families (Froese and Pauly, 2018). In India, three genera belonging to 16 species of goatfishes were reported by Vivekanandan et al., 2003. The selected goatfishes Cinnabar goatfish Parupeneus heptacanthus and goatfish Upeneus moluccensis is found over sandy bottoms in calm lagoons or bays in shallow,seagrass beds in coastal waters (Kurmaran and Randall, 1984). These species diet consists of a variety of small invertebrates, including crabs, shrimps, polychaetes, spunculids, small pelecypods and gastropods, hermit crabs, heart urchin and foraminifera (Randall, 2001). It also occasionally captures small fishes. The length-weight relationship gives mathematical relationship between two measurements and to calculate condition factor (Le Cren, 1951). They provide yield equations and in estimations of stock size. Moreover, it used in population parameters and comparative growth studies (Moutopoulos and Stergiou, 2002). The length-weight relationship and morphometric characters of U. moluccensis were studied by Ali and Sanjeevan, 1984 off Veraval coast.
In globally, the length-weight relationships of both P. heptacanthus and U. moluccensis were studied by few authors (Ali and Sanjeevan ,1984; Kulbicki et al., 2005;...