Heritability of semen quality traits of crossbred Isa Brown and Nigerian indigenous cocks

Abstract

Main and reciprocal crossbred cocks from a population of 531 day-old chicks were used to study heritability of semen volume (SV), sperm motility (SM), sperm concentration (SC) and live sperm (SP) at 36 and 40 weeks of age. Analysis of variance was performed for unbalanced nested design. The analysis yielded variance components of sire (σs2), dam (σd2) and sire plus dam (σs+d2 ), and heritability (h2) of the traits was estimated therefrom. The estimates ranged from 1.33 to 0.02 and 1.481 to 0.03; 1.48 to 0.10 and 0.96 to 0.08; 0.97 to 0.12 and 0.89 to 0.04 at 36 and 40 weeks for SV, SM, SC and LS, respectively. Estimates from σs 2, σd 2 and σs+d2 ranged from 1.48 to 0.02, 1.04 to 0.03 and 0.85 to 0.06 ; 1.10 to 0.04, 1.21 to 0.18 and 0.90 to 0.05; 0.96 to 0.09, 1.48 to 0.01and 0.76 to 0.10; 0.97 to 0.04, 0.89 to 0.12 and 0.69 to 0.08 for the four traits, respectively. Large additive genetic variances existed for most of the semen quality traits, especially the live sperm from sire and sire plus dam variance