N. Jeyaraj¹ , S. Ravikumar¹ , C. Rajthilak¹ , S. Prasanna Kumar¹ , P. Santhanam²

1 Department of Oceanography and Coastal Area Studies, School of Marine Sciences, Alagappa University, Thondi Campus, Thondi 623 409, India
2 Department of Marine Science, School of Marine Sciences, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli 620 024, India
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Marine Science, 2016, Vol. 6, No. 28   doi: 10.5376/ijms.2016.06.0028
Received: 21 Apr., 2016    Accepted: 01 Aug., 2016    Published: 02 Aug., 2016

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Jeyaraj N., Ravikumar S., Rajthilak C., Kumar S.P., and Santhanam P., 2016, Abundance and Diversity of Zooplankton Along the Gulf of Mannar Region, Southeast coast of India, International Journal of Marine Science, 6(28): 1-9 (doi: 10.5376/ijms.2016.06.0028)

The study addresses the abundance and diversity of zooplankton along the Gulf of Mannar. Sampling was done from the nine stations. The samples were collected by horizontal hauls using the zooplankton net (150μm mesh size, 0.5 m mouth diameter and length 1.5 m) fitted with digital flow meter. From the study we recorded a total of 114 species of which the copepods formed the dominant group in all the stations. Which consists of Acartia spinicauda, Acartia danae, Pseudodiaptomus aurivilli, Eucalanus elongatus, Labidocera acuta, Nannocalanus minor, Paracalanus parvus, Corycaeus speciosus, Dioithona rigida, Oithona similis, Metis jousseaumei, Favella brevis and Tintinnopsis directa. The other dominant groups were barnacle nauplii, bivalves, gastropods larvae etc. The highest abundance (11,733 Nos./m3) was recorded in station 2, while the lowest (1,913 Nos./m3) was recorded in station 6. Diversity (H) was higher in the station 4 whereas the lowest diversity was observed from station 5 and no significant differences in Evenness (J) and Richness (SR) were observed between stations. A chemometric analysis such as cluster analysis (CA) and principal component analysis (PCA) reveals that, relationship among the zooplankton groups and studied stations. There was not any significant difference in zooplankton abundance between stations (p> 0.05).

Gulf of Mannar; Zooplankton; Species richness; Species association; Cluster analysis; Principal component analysis