Genetic Evaluation of Iraqi Awassi Rams According to Some Growth Traits of Their Progeny Lambs

Abstract

This study was carried out on the research station of sheep and goat (Abo Gharib, west of Baghdad, Iraq) to evaluate the 120 Awassi rams for the birth weight (BW), weight at weaning (WW) and pre-weaning daily gains (DG) of their lambs after adjusting to the effects of parity, year of birth, sex, and type of birth (single, twin). Restricted Maximum Likelihood (REML) method in a mixed model (paternal half sib) was utilized to estimate the heritability (h²) for above mentioned traits. Proc mixed in SAS program was used to estimate Best Linear Unbiased Prediction (BLUP) values of rams for the three studied traits. The results revealed that the means of BW, WW and DG were 3.85, 26.64 and 0.181kg respectively. The studied traits were significantly (P < 0.01) affected by all fixed effects except the effect of ram on WW and DG which was significant (P < 0.05). Heritability estimates (h²) of BW, WW and DG were 0.23, 0.12 and 0.19 respectively. The lowest and highest BLUP values for the mentioned traits were -0.325, 0.255 kg, -1.142, 1.284 kg, and -0.103, 0.053 kg respectively. In conclusion: the results indicated that selection of rams for DG and BW could play an important role for improving the growth traits of Awassi sheep due to the high range among BLUP values along with the acceptable estimations of heritability.

Factors Affecting in Some Productive Traits for Local and Turkish Awassi Sheep

“…54 ± 0.12 kg, as these results were in agreement with, Rather (, 5353 ,) We note from the results of Table (3) that there was no significant effect of the mother's age on the birth weight of the lambs, as we note that the mother's aging did not affect the average birth weight of her lambs, as it reached the highest birth weight of three-year-old ewes (4.71 ± 0.14 kg) and the lowest weight of ewes The consequences between the ages of two to six years (4.57 ± 0.19 kg), and these results agreed with the results of Hermiz and Alkass ( 534; ) It is evident from the results presented in Table (3) that males have an insignificant superiority over females. Its amount (0.51 kg) in the average born weight was 4.72 ± 0.09 and 4.21 ± 0.10 kg for male and female lambs symmetrically, where these results are similar to the effects of Al-Samarai et al (2016) and Al-Momani (2020).…”