Interrelationships of the family Pleuronectidae (Pisces: Pleuronectiformers)
1984
Sakamoto, K. (Hokkaido Univ., Hakodate (Japan). Faculty of Fisheries)
The present study attempts to clarify the interrelationships of the fishes of the family Pleuronectidae and to classify the species on the basis of these interrelationships. The specimens of 77 species or subspecies of 114 known species collected from nearly all the waters of the world were used for the comparative morphology. The following 12 skeletal parts of each specimen were examined: jaw apparatus, cranium, orbital bones, suspensorium and opercular apparatus, hyoid arch, branchial apparatus and gill rakers, fins pectoral girdle, pelvic girdle, urohyal, vertebrae and their accessory bones, and caudal skeleton and fin. In addition to skeletons, some external and additional internal characters were examined. In order to elucidate the interrelationships of the family, numerical phenetics was applied as a systematic methodology. The similarity between every OTU (species or subspecies) was calculated using Gower's coefficient of similarity with a slight modification on 78 morphological characters lacking intraspecific variation. Each OTU was grouped by cluster analysis, UPGMA in the present study, on the basis of the similarity between every OTU. The result of the cluster analysis was represented by means of the dendrogram which showed the interrelationships of the pleuronectids. Then, the species were ranked to supraspecific taxa, genus and subfamily, by selecting a level of phenetic similarity (phenon lines)
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