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5th Edition of
World Aquaculture and Fisheries Conference

June 09-11, 2025 | Rome, Italy
WAC 2022

Incongruence between morphological and genetic data of Scomber colias in Tunisian waters

Hassen Allaya, Speaker at Aquaculture Conferences
University of Tunis-El Manar, Tunisia
Title : Incongruence between morphological and genetic data of Scomber colias in Tunisian waters

Abstract:

The Atlantic chub mackerel Scomber colias (Gmelin, 1789) is one of the important fisheries resources in Tunisian waters. The best management of this resource needs the knowledgement of populations differentiation. Therefore, morphological  study including  13 morphometric, 4 meristic characters and sequences of mitochondrial DNA control region were carried out from three distant sampling sites along the coast of Tunisia in order to test a possible differentiation between the three populations. 
Morphologic analysis of adults specimens revealed statistically  significant differences for 13 standardized morphometric measurements and 2 meristic characters (the number of branchial spins Right(BrR) and Left (BrL)).In fact, in morphometric traits, the overall assignments of individuals into their origin groups were 83.87% for the morphometric variables and 49% for the meristic data, respectively. However, the genetic study revealed the absence of genetic structure between the three populations with a lower and insignificant fixation index (ΦST=-0.004, P=0.701). 
Despite the non-convergence between the genetic and morphological data, a possible signal of differentiation between 3 groups of Scomber colias which belonging to the same population seems plausible. In future, geometric morphometry and microsatellites markers are required to confirm our results.

Biography:

Dr. Hassen ALLAYA studied Biological Sciences in the Faculty of Sciences of Monastir (Tunisia) and graduated as MS in 2000. He got then the diploma of advanced studies at the National Institute of Agronomy of Tunis (Tunisia) in 2003. Then the PhD in 2016 at the Faculty of Sciences of Tunis (Tunisia). During his preparation work for his doctoral thesis, he joined a research team within the marine biology research unit at the Faculty of Sciences of Tunis in collaboration with the genetic ichthyology laboratory at the University of Girona (Spain). Since 2018, he is part of the research team of the Laboratory of Ecology, Biology and Physiology of Aquatic Organisms at the Faculty of Sciences of Tunis. He is a Senior Professor Emeritus Exceptional Class and he has within 30 publications of research articles.

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