Fish Larvae Composition in Sungai Sarawak Kanan, Sarawak, Malaysia

Fish larvae studies are important to fisheries management as it provides information that helps fishery biologist and can act as indicators for predicting coming fish stocks. It also can be an indicator for the health of aquatic environment. The fish larvae, as adults,mlive in a wide variety of habitats. Thus, it can be difficult to identify fish larvae. There are not much of information about species background of fish larvae in Sarawak freshwater especially in recent years. The study of species composition and the diversity of fish larvae are still limited compared to other studies and to other countries. The purpose of this study is to identify fish larvae and also to determine the composition of the fish larvae that can be found in Sungai Sarawak Kanan, Sarawak, Malaysia. The sampling were done by using ring net and the samples were sorted up until family rank. Total of 192 fish larvae were collected from this sampling and dominated by family Cyprinidae (86.98%), followed by Gobiidae (11.46%), Syngrathidae (0.52%), Anabantidae (0.52%) and Eleotridae (0.52%). The highest density of fish larvae (individual per m3) were from station 3 and the lowest were from station 9 and 10. Therefore, from this research, we are able to identify fish larvae that are collected in Sungai Sarawak Kanan and also be able to determine the fish larvae composition