Isometric growth in the world's largest bony fishes (genus Mola)? Morphological insights from fisheries bycatch data.

摘要: For teleost fishes, the relationship between morphometric traits can provide significant insight into species life history, however gathering such data for noncommercial prove challenging. Here, we use collected opportunistically from fisheries bycatch and stranding events to assess growth scaling over orders of magnitude in ocean sunfish (genus Mola). Intriguingly, confidence intervals length mass suggests that isometric is likely, a pattern rarely observed fishes owing supportive structures. These also enabled assessment geometric morphometrics, which indicated Mola sp shape varies subtly but significantly ontogenetically, with increased fin area comparative body as fish increase size. More practically, total emerged an effective predictor range morphological traits, including mass, lengths surface area, vital baseline modeling management.