Heritability of Egg Production in White Holland Turkeys

ESTIMATES of the heritability of egg production in chickens have been reported by several investigators. Although the inheritance of egg production in turkeys has been studied by Asmundson (1938 Asmundson (1941) and Whitson et al. (1944), there is limited information available concerning the heritability of this character. Wilson and Johnson (1946) estimated the heritability of egg production by pooling data from Bronze and Beltsville Small White turkeys. The estimate calculated by means of the offspring-dam regression method was 2 percent. Shaklee et al. (1952) obtained a much larger heritability of 40 percent for egg production in Beltsville Small White turkeys. Their estimates were calculated by means of full-sib and half-sib correlations and intra-sire regressions. Blow and Glazener (1954) calculated the heritability of egg production in their flock of Broad Breasted Bronze turkeys by phenotypic correlations between full-sibs and half-sibs and intra-sire regressions of offspring on dam. An average of the three …