author(s)
Mangesh M Bhosale, RA Pawar, MP Bhendarkar, MS Sawant and AS Pawase

abstract
The present study was done on blue swimming crabs namely, Portunus pelagicus, P. sanguinolentus and Charybdis feriatus with a view to differentiate them on the basis of body shape using truss network. The truss distances between 14 landmarks on dorsal and 15 on ventral aspect of cephalothorax with 29 and 35 truss variables were measured. The Student’s t-test significantly differentiated three species (p<0.05). A suit of multivariate techniques (PCA, FA and CVA) was performed to investigate distinction and pattern of morphological variation between species. PCA and FA performed on truss data yielded similar results where eigenvectors of first two components (PC1 & PC2) had explained 97.40% of variance for dorsal side while first component for ventral side data accounted 92.96% of the total variance. However, CVA strongly differentiated three species with a high magnitude of differences based on Hotelling’s (Sequential Bonferroni significance) p-values (p<0.0001) on both the aspects. The findings support the use of truss network to unequivocal identification of numerous species, taxonomic clarification, morphological variation among species and it also provides interesting perspectives for the study of stock identification and geographic variation.