Journal of the Marine Biological Association of India

The food of two species of sardines - Sardinella gibbosa (Bleeker) and Sardinella albella (Valeniciennes) in east African waters.

Volume 15 Issue 2

W. Okera

Abstract

The zooplankton components of the stomach contents of S. gibbosa (size range 6.214 cm) and S. albella (size range 6.2-12.9 cm) caught in the Light Fishery of Dar es Salaam was investigated over a period of twelve and thirteen months for the former and latter species respectively. Both S. gibbosa and S. albella were found to prey principally on about the same fifteen groups and species of zooplankters (mostly Crustacea), whose relative abundance in the stomach of the two species showed a positive Kendall's co-efficient of concordance. For both the species of sardine, there was also a fair degree of agreement between the relative abundance of each type of prey in the stomach and the frequency of the latter which contained that particular kind of zooplanktonic prey. There were about thirty other groups and species of zooplankters in the stomachs, but most of these were in insignificant proportion or of only occasional occurrence.

The problems of (i) relationship of size of fish to the type of food eaten and(ii) the mode of clupeid feeding, are discussed in the light of present results and a comparison is made of this work with observations on the food of sardines from other areas of the Indian Ocean.

Date : 31-12-1973