Morphometric Characterization of Adult Artemia (Crustacea: Branchiopoda) Populations from Costal and Inland Tunisian Salt Lakes

Hachem Ben Naceur,Mohamed Salah Romdhane,Amel Ben Rejeb Jenhani

doi:10.5733/afin.054.0214

Hachem Ben Naceur, Mohamed Salah Romdhane + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.5733/afin.054.0214

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Journal: African Invertebrates	Publication Date: Dec 1, 2013
Citations: 20	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: Instituto de Ciencias Agrarias

Abstract

Tunisia has many Artemia populations, but little information is available concerning their taxonomy, biometry and morphology. This work is an updated systematic inventory of Artemia populations in Tunisia, based on the comparison of different morphometric parameters measured in cultured adult individuals. Sixteen Tunisian Artemia populations were examined. The study included reference samples of two Artemia franciscana (San Francisco Bay, California, USA; and Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA) populations. The variability among the diverse populations was studied by statistical treatment of data through the analysis of variance. This analysis did not unveil any particular similarity among the Artemia populations studied, apart from the width of the head of male specimens (F=1.088, P=0.360). Biometrical analysis of these data was performed via multivariate discriminant analysis, and using the origin of each population as a separation factor. Results revealed that all the Tunisian Artemia populations studied can be classified as Artemia salina, with the exception of the Artemia population from Sabkhet Halk El Menzel, which belongs to Artemia franciscana.

Highlights

The brine shrimp Artemia Leach, 1819 (Branchiopoda: Anostraca) comprises a number of bisexual species and parthenogenetic strains that are morphologically similar
Morphometric characteristics showed a clear differentiation between Tunisian populations and the two reference populations
In the case of males (Table 5), the analysis shows that morphometric characters correlated with the first discriminant function are total length, length of cercopod, width of second abdominal segment and abdominal length

Summary

Introduction

The brine shrimp Artemia Leach, 1819 (Branchiopoda: Anostraca) comprises a number of bisexual species and parthenogenetic strains that are morphologically similar. The taxonomic study of Artemia populations in the Western Old World, including Italy, the South of France and the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), together with North Africa, is interesting owing to the presence of the Mediterranean bisexual Artemia salina (L., 1758) and at least two different parthenogenetic forms, diploid and tetraploid (Gilchrist 1960; Vieira & Amat 1985; Vanhaecke et al 1987; Amat et al 1995) This Mediterranean region holds the recent invader species, Artemia franciscana Kellogg, 1906 (Narciso 1989; Amat et al 1995; Amat et al 2005; Mura et al 2004; Amat et al 2007; Scalone & Rabet 2013). There is a paucity of data regarding their taxonomy, biogeography and genetic characteristics. Kaiser et al (2006) published the most recent checklist of http://africaninvertebrates.org urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:C8FCDA31-609F-4E8E-8AB7-578D7A2D6CA0

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