Abstract:

Morphological data of Procambarus clarkii and Cambaroides dauricus collected from Jiangsu and Heilongjiang provinces in China were analyzed. Thirteen proportion of morphometric trait were measured from crayfish and the degree of morphological variation among populations was calculated using two multivariate analysis. In the principal component analysis of the female populations, three principal components were constructed, the contributory ratio of the first principal component was 62.104%, the second and the third was 14.201% and 7.959% respectively, the cumulative contributory ratio was 84.264%. Accordingly, for the male populations, two principal components were also constructed, their contributory ratios were 77.960% and 7.837% respectively, the cumulative contributory ratio was 85.797%, and the morphological variations in different species were mostly induced by differences of different length and width in body. Discriminant analysis indicated that the identification accuracy of female was 100.0% (P1) and 100.0% (P2), the total discriminant accuracy was 100.0%. The identification accuracy of male was 100.0% (P1) and 100.0% (P2), the total discriminant accuracy was 100.0%. All results supported that coefficient of difference between C. dauricus and P. clarkii were characterized subspecies, which was consistent with the status of their traditional taxonomy and shows feasibility of multivariate analysis in this study.