GENETIC CONTRIBUTION OF RAM ON LITTER SIZE IN ŠUMAVA SHEEP
2015
Jitka Schmidová | Michal Milerski | Alena Svitáková | Luboš Vostrý
The objective of the present study was to quantify the service sire effect in terms of (co) variance components of born and weaned lambs number and to propose models for the potential inclusion of this effect in the linear equations for breeding value estimation. The database with 21,324 lambings in Šumava sheep from 1992- 2013 was used. The basic model equation for the analysis of variance of litter size contained effects of ewe´s age at lambing, contemporary group, permanent environmental effect of ewe and direct additive genetic effect of ewe. Two modifications of the basic model were used for estimation of service sire effect. The proportions of variance for the service sire effect for number of born and weaned lambs were 2.1% and 2.0%, when service sire was not included into relationship matrix; while included into the relationship matrix and dividing effect into genetic contribution and permanent environment effect refer that nongenetic effect seems to be bigger than genetic (0.013 vs. 0.009 for number of born and 0.017 vs. 0.004 for number of weaned). Changes in other variance components were relatively low, except of contemporary group. Model including service sire effect as a simple random effect without genetic relationship matrix inclusion is recommended for genetic evaluation of litter size traits.
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