Assessment of Morphometric and Genetic Variation in Three Freshwater Fish Species of the Genus Garra (Osteichthyes: Cyprinidae)

The present study evaluated the patterns of morphometric and genetic variation using RAPD-PCR techniques for the first time on three species of Garra, viz. G. mullya, G. kalakadensis and G. gotyla stenorhynchus, collected from various river basins of South-India. The results of morphological analysis revealed that G. mullya and G. kalakadensis hold many similar characters compared to the other congener, G. gotyla stenorhynchus. However, the G. gotyla stenorhynchus fish species exhibited distinct variation in the morphological characters such as snout length, pre-nasal length, inter-nasal width, gap width, lower jaw to isthmus, head depth at pupil, dorsal fin length and disc width from the other two species of Garra. However, certain morphometric characters overlapped. Hence the RAPD finger printing was used to assess the levels of genetic variation in Garra spp. using RAPD-PCR technique. A total of 72 reliable fragments were detected using 10 Operon primers, ranging from 2600 molecular weight to 3100. The shared RAPD fragments found in both G. mullya and G. kalakadensis with fixed frequencies were observed with all the investigated primers, implying their genetically closer relationship. However, the similarity index observed for G. gotyla stenorhynchus was less with the other two species specifying a genetically distant link. The present investigation thus contribute to the knowledge on morphological and genetic variation in these three Garra species.