International Journal of Marine Science, 2017, Vol.7, No.19, 183-187
186
ontological stages in the wild, is unknown (Bueno et al., 2015). To determine the overall incidence and effect of
these abnormalities, survival throughout development, larva through adult, must be considered.
In all cases reporting saddleback syndrome, the dorsal fin in its both parts, spinous and soft, is involved in
deformity, where these elements showed missing at different levels (Cobcroft and Battaglene, 2013). In the
present specimen, the saddleback is appeared to affect the anterior part, a case which agrees with the results
obtained for other fish species (Tave et al., 1983).
Both the pughead and saddleback syndrome deformities might resulted from an unhealthy environment, with
contaminants originated from anthropogenic activities that has an influence on early life history stages of fish
directly (Browder et al., 1993; Gagnon and Rawson, 2009). On the other hand, and for saddleback syndrome, the
predation by other fish species and injuries by sea birds on fish specimens in the studied area during early life
history remains possible.
Future research is required to study the variability of both pughead and saddleback syndrome in both juvenile and
adult commercial fish species in different locations and years, taking into consideration the mortalities that related
to these two anomalies.
Authors’ contributions
All authors have contributed equally toward the publication of this paper.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Ege University Faculty of Fisheries, Turkey for giving us the opportunity to examine and study the
deformed fish specimens. Our thanks are also due to Sergey Bogorodsky of Station of Naturalists, Omsk, Russia and Ronald Fricke
of Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde, Rosenstein, Germany, for identification of the species.
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