Abstract
This study was conducted in the southeastern part of the Caspian Sea in Mazandaran (Goharbaran) from a project [#4-76-12-95101] during 2013 -2014. Samples were collected monthly at 8 stations. The aim of this study was to evaluate the density and biomass of biological parameters at different months and their relationships with fish catch ratio such as <i>Cyprinus carpio</i> and <i>Rutilus kutum</i> Kamensky, 1901. Overall, 157 species of phytoplankton were identified which belonged to 8 phyla among them Bacillariophyta comprised to 48% of the highest species frequency. A total of 11 species of zooplankton, and 24 species of macrobenthos were found. There was a significant differences between density and biomass of biological parameters at different stations (p <0.05). The results showed that the density of phytoplankton in winter was the highest value at all stations. In contrast, the density of zooplankton decreased at the same time. This could be due to the lack of grazing animal e.g. zooplankton which grazing on phytoplankton. Based on Principal component analysis (PCA) the maximum value of similarity coefficient for <i>C. carpio</i> were in November and December (0.997) and for R. kutum Kamensky, 1901 in February and April (0.998), respectively. This could be due to the data of sampling stations which located to the inshore water and the substrate feeding behavior of carp and approaching the spawning season and spend the reproductive period in the river for Kutum.
Highlights
The Caspian Sea is famous for possessing valuable species of sturgeon and bony fishes which assume for more economical and ecological importance [18]
According to Duncan test (ANOVA) the results showed that the density in different months could be divided into 5 groups: group 1 included early July, June, May and October, October and April in Group 2, Group 3 consisted of November, December, January, and September and in group 4 and group 5 were September - December and December – March, respectively
The long term monitoring of previous investigation performed in the southern coast of the Caspian Sea showed that so far 335 species of phytoplankton were identified in which Bacillariophyta, Pyrrophyta, Cyanophyta, Chlorophyta and Euglenophyta was the main phyla and three other phyla with less diversity including Chrysophyta, Xanthophyta and Chryptophyta [3, 21, 22, 28, 32, 45]
Summary
The Caspian Sea is famous for possessing valuable species of sturgeon and bony fishes which assume for more economical and ecological importance [18]. Cyprinidae fish account for about 40 percent and Kutum (R. kutum Kamensky, 1901) alone, more than 50 percent of bony fish catch in the Caspian Sea that comprise more than 90 percent of the fishermen income. Common carp (Cyprinus carpio) is economically valuable species fish and consist the third place of fish catch in Guilan and Mazandaran provinces and the first rank in fishermen income in Golestan province [8, 10, 17, 20]. Since the Caspian Sea ecosystem was changed consistently in recent years due to some reasons such as the comb jelly
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