Bill Variation of Captive and Wild Chukar Partridge Populations: Shape or Size

Tamer Albayrak,Ahmet İhsan Aytek

doi:10.3390/d14010048

Abstract

Traditionally, morphological characters are widely used to distinguish between interspecies and intraspecies. In addition to the size of morphological characters, shape has also been used as an indicator in the last decades. We evaluated the geometric morphometry and morphometric of the bill of Chukar Partridge, Alectoris chukar from captive and wild populations to determine the bill variation and population relationships. Although there was a size difference between the sexes, no shape difference was found. However, captive populations differed from wild populations in both size and shape. Although there was no difference in shape among wild populations, some differences were found in size. Moreover, bill sizes of captive populations were statistically longer than western, centre, and eastern wild populations. It was also shown that the western populations had the most significant variation among the wild populations. The results revealed that using the size and shape together was more effective in comparing populations.

Highlights

Morphological differences in species with the effect of evolutionary forces are significant in species identification, and these differences may be in the shape and the size of the morphological character
We found that 48 females and 50 males, accounted for 56.9% of the 172 samples using the molecular sexing method (File S1)
There were some differences in morphometric size (M) between the sexes, no difference was found in shape based on the geometric morphometric (GM) analysis

Summary

Introduction

Morphological differences in species with the effect of evolutionary forces are significant in species identification, and these differences may be in the shape and the size of the morphological character. Darwin described the finch species and explained their evolutionary relationship using bill characters Supporting this argument, the size of the morphological characters was found to be important in distinguishing similar species from each other, such as Insecta [1], Amphibia [2], Reptilia [3], Mammalia [4], and Aves [5]. In the morphological comparisons of different populations of the same species, geometric morphometry studies based on the shape of the morphological character, as well as the classical size comparison, have become increasingly common in the last decades [6,9,10,11,12,13]. Species can be grouped into different animal classes, such as Mammalia [18,19], Reptilia and Amphibia [6,20,21], and Insecta [13,22,23]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion