A comparison of the interaction, with two types of environment, of pure strains or strain crosses of poultry

Abstract

In these experiments comparisons were made between the magnitude of the interaction of ‘pure’ strains and strain crosses of poultry with two types of environments—location effects and a restricted-feed versus a full-feed rearing programme. The ‘pure’ strains were closed flocks of White Leghorns that had been selected for increased egg production, while the strain crosses were the reciprocal crosses of all combinations of these pure strains. Data from four separate experiments in four consecutive years used for this study involved 8320 laying birds. Six traits of the adult laying birds were used for these analyses. It was expected that the ‘pure’ strains would differ in performance amongst themselves to a greater extent than the strain crosses, and for the two traits, body-weight at housing and sexual maturity, this was found to be the case in three out of four years. These two traits were affected to the greatest extent by the rearing treatment. Also, the genotype-environment interaction variance was found to be significant and of important magnitude relative to the genetic variance for these two traits. Where the environmental effect was found to be smaller, the interaction variance made up a smaller proportion of the genetic variance.