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Abstract

The increase in the high demand for snakehead fish from the community causes high exploitation of this fish. The high activity of catching snakehead fish along with the production volume that increases every year will certainly threaten the sustainability of snakehead fish. The need for morphometric and meristic research is to provide information that can be used for conservation efforts in the Klawing River. The purpose of this study was to determine whether standard morphometry, truss morphometric, and meristic can be used to identify the sex of snakehead fish from the Klawing River and to determine the specific characters that distinguish the morphology of male and female snakehead fish. The method used is a survey with accidental sampling from the Klawing River assisted by fishermen. Sampling was carried out 5 times from February to March 2021. The variables observed were morphological performance, standard morphometry, truss morphometric, and meristic. Parameters in this study were body shape, mouth shape, mouth position, caudal fin shape, type of scales, tooth type, ratio of body parts distances, number of fin rays, and number of scales. The perfprmance morphological, standard morphometric, truss morphometric, and meristic then analyzed descriptive. The results showed that morphological performance could not be used as a sex determine of snakehead fish. The standard morphometric characters that can be used as sex differences for snakehead fish from 21 characters are head width with an asymp.sig value 0.20. The truss morphometric character that can be used as sex distinguishing snakehead fish is from 23 characters, A1 with an asymp.sig value 0.048, A6 with an asymp.sig value 0.038, C5 with an asymp.sig value 0.021. Meristic characters cannot be used to distinguish the sex of snakehead fish, because they have relatively the same number of fin rays and scales.