Morphometric, Meristic and Some Biological Aspects of Acropoma japonicum (Gunther, 1859) Recorded from the Indian Waters

Glowbelly (Acropoma japonicum) belongs to the family Acropomatidae and popularly known to occur in deeper waters. Its record in the east coast and west coast of India was studied for its morphometric, meristic, length & weight and also some biological aspects. The meristic analyses indicated that the high degree of correlation between total length and each of other body measurement. Morphometric counts and length frequency studies was found useful in characterizing its population. No significant difference could be observed in the mean values from a set of observations which is normally distributed from east coast while comparing with the distribution of a single cohort of the species caught at west coast of India. In the present study, an attempt has been made to define identification characteristics and characterizing its population by studying its morphometric, meristic and size distribution. The morphometric relationships revealed that in respect of total length, the fork length grows faster (b=0.87) than standard length (b=0.81), whereas, body depth grows faster (b=0.27) than head length (b=0.22) and length of Ist dorsal fin grows faster (b=0.13) than IInd dorsal fin (b=0.11), in respect of head length as independent character (X), revealed that the pre-dorsal length grows faster (b=0.48) than the inter-orbital length (b=0.27) and the eye diameter (b=0.31). The females were found dominate the males in all the size groups, with an aggregate sex ratio 1.3:1. The length-weight relationship for males, females and pooled was found to be , and respectively. The coefficient of determination for male, female and combined found to be 0.7163, 0.7227 and 0.7747 respectively, indicating that only 72%, 72% and 77% of variation in weight is explained by the total length in respect of male, female and combined. The species found to be mainly feeding upon the items like juvenile of the shrimps and occasionally on detritus. As there is no more information available on the abundance, maturation and spawning of the species from Indian waters the need of the hour is to workout resource specific stock assessment and its utilization for the future as more fishing pressure prevails up to 100m depth and also the future fisheries only towards deep sea resources.