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International Journal of Marine Science 2014, Vol.4, No.32: 1-3
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3
The marine environment of the north part of the
Arabian Gulf and the environment of the Iraqi
marine waters in particular is different from that in
the remaining parts of the Gulf (Al-Yamani et al.,
2004). Iraqi marine waters, where individual
reported here was caught, are characterised by
freshwater flux from two main sources, the Shat
al-Arab River in the north east and oligihaline waters
from the greater marsh area at the northwest through
Khor al-Zubair, a north western extension of the
Arabian Gulf. Freshwater inflow heavily decrease
salinity of marine waters of Iraq (4 ‰-39 ‰)
(Al-Mehdi et al., 2009) and is source of nutrients
and particulate organic matter increasing
productivity of the northwestern Arabian Gulf
(Hussain and Ahmed, 1999).
The environment of the remaining parts of the gulf
has a shallow depth and restricted water exchange, it
is the characterized by extreme sea-surface
temperatures (Riegl, 2001; Sheppard and Loughland,
2002), hyper-saline conditions occur year-round
(Reynolds, 1993) and a moderate to low primary
production found within the southern part of the gulf
(Nezlin et al., 2007).
Such strong environmental gradient along the
Arabian Gulf may restrict distribution of certain
species that unable to adapt to wide range of salinity
and temperatures. Until now the species in question
is reported from the southern part of the Gulf only
(Nielsen, 1995) a habitat that is very different from
that of the northern part of the Arabian Gulf. The
present record of
rom the Iraqi marine
waters indicating a significant range extension of its
previously known distribution.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Marine Science Centre, Basrah
University for giving us the opportunity to study and publish
on the presence of this species.
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