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Title: ESTIMATES OF HERITABILITY AND REPEATABILITY OF WEANING WEIGHT OF NELLORE CATTLE IN BRAZIL

Author
item SOUZA, J. - UNESP BOTUCATU
item Van Vleck, Lloyd
item EUCLIDES FILHO, K. - EMBRAPA/CNPGC, BRAZIL
item GADINI, C. - UNIV. OF NEBRASKA-LINCOLN
item SILVA, L. - EMBRAPA/CNPGC, BRAZIL
item RAMOS, A. - UNESP BOTUCATU

Submitted to: Journal of Animal Science Supplement
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 6/10/1996
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: The objective of this work was to study heritability and repeatability of weaning weight at 205 days of Nellore cattle in different tropical regions in Brazil. There were 108,149 records of calves born from 1978 through 1994, progeny of 588 bulls and 57,821 cows. The sire model, with sires assumed to be unrelated, used in the analysis included year (17) and month (12) of birth of calves, sex (2) and farm (416) as fixed effects. Age of dam was accounted for with as linear and quadratic covariates. The dam effect was used as an uncorrelated random effect to account for maternal effects. Mean weaning weight was 161 plus/minus 24.9 kg. Estimates of variance components were obtained with the MTDFREML programs. The estimate of sire component of variance was 27.4, the estimate of the dam component of variance was 81.1 and estimate of phenotypic variance was 421.6. The direct heritability estimate was 0.26 and maternal repeatability was 0.19. The estimates heritability and repeatability of weaning weight were in the range that indicate possibility for effective selection of calves and response to culling of cows that wean calves below herd average.