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Article History

Received: 29 June 2021

Revised: 2 February 2022

Accepted: 18 March 2022

First Online: 18 July 2022

Declarations

:

: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

: All applicable international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for animal testing, animal care, and the use of animals were followed by the authors.

: All necessary permits for sampling and observational field studies have been obtained by the authors from the competent authorities.

: DNA sequences were uploaded to NCBI, with the following GenBank Accessions: MN511846–MN512146, MN530052, and MN530053 (see Table ). All collecting and sequence data are available on the Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD) under the project “Barcoding of Coastal Fishes of Pakistan (BCFPA).”

: Shabir Ali Amir carried out the major research of this paper including field sampling, laboratory analysis, manuscript writing, and revisions; Baidong Zhang contributed mainly on laboratory barcoding analysis; Li Yu Long and Xue Dong Xiu contributed to the laboratory protocols; Rafaqat Masroor carried out part of field sampling and helped in the manuscript preparation; Safia Mushtaq and Shahnaz Rashid mainly helped in field collection of some problematic fish groups; Naveed Ahmed helped in acquiring a collection of flatfishes and morphometric identification of fishes; Jean-Dominique Durand helped in preparing Fig. and in the discussion section of the manuscript; Jinxian Liu designed and advised this research, and made a major contribution to data analyses, manuscript writing, and its revision.