A fine structural review on the spermatozoa of Cyprinidae with attention to their phylogenetic implications

Abstract

The fine structural organization and dimensions of spermatozoa from species of 4 subfamilies of the Cyprinidae (Barbus barbus, Carassius carassius, Cyprinus carpio carpio, Cyprinus carpio haematopterus, Abramis brama, Alburnoides bipunctatus, Alburnus alburnus, Chalcalburnus chalcoides mento, Chondrostoma nasus, Hypophthalmichthys molitrix, Leuciscus cephalus, Phoxinus phoxinus, Rutilus rutilus, Rutilus meidingerii, Scardinius erythrophthalmus, Vimba vimba and Ctenopharyngodon idella) are compared with each other as well as with results from other studies. Based on these descriptions it is investigated whether sperm structure reveals correlations with the existing systematics and if it could be a useful taxonomical parameter. The scatter plots based on the discriminate analysis and the neighbour-joining trees based on a Mahalanobis distance matrix reveal that sperm organization is related with systematics in many aspects. However, in some cases there are also clear differences between relations found on the basis of sperm morphology and between the systematic relations.