Abstract:
Through multivariate morphometrics methods and on 8 morphological proportional characters, we analyzed the morphological variations from three different geographical populations of
Monodonta labio, which were collected from Dalian, Zhoushan and Xiamen. Cluster and principal component analyses showed that morphological characters were rather similar between Zhoushan population and Xiamen population, from which Dalian population was quite different. Three principal components were constructed, of which the contributory ratio, from high to low, were 57.49%, 18.80% and 10.40%, summing up to 86.69%. The discriminant functions of the three populations were established with discriminant accuracy 63.16%~81.82% for P
1 and 60.00% ~81.82% for P
2, and the average discriminant accuracy was 74.13%. C.D between three geographical populations of
Monodonta labio was 0.1918~0.9457, less than 1.28. The results of multi-variant indicate that there are some morphological differences among the three different geographical populations, but the morphological variation of them is characterized under-subspecies.