Abstract

By means of constructing the body shape from contiguous quadrilaterals, the application of discriminant morphometric model was employed for species identification: Mugil curema, Mugil rubrioculus, Mugil trichodon, Mugil liza, and Mugil incilis for the purpose of confirm the existence of attributes discriminant morphometric in conjunction with meristic characters and clarify the problem of misidentification, very common in these species. A total of 147 individuals were studied. The analysis was performed using x-rays digitalized. The discrimination was performed in 12 sequential steps, was selected only 10 of the original 23 morphometric variables. In the classification results, the percentage was about 93.2% of grouped cases correctly, as confirmed by cross-validation. The best classification rate was presented by M. incilis with 100%, followed by M. trichodon with a 95.7%, M. curema with 94.3%, M. liza with a 92.1% and finally M. rubrioculus with 85.2%. The variable that showed greater sturdiness in the discrimination of all species was the height of the body, to the level of anal fin. Other variables that showed high discriminant power, was contained to three measures in the global configuration of the head, as well as the length of the base of the anal fin. This study also found that there is a close morphological resemblance between species M. rubrioculus and M. trichodon that between M. rubrioculus and M. curema. The use of this technique, allowed to find new measures, that with traditional ones corroborating the taxonomic identity of these five species.

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