Estimation of additive and maternal covariance of production traits in Murrah buffalo

The study was done to determine additive, maternal and common permanent environmental effects and best-suited model for some production traits using six univariate animal models that differed in the (co)variance components fitted to assess the importance of maternal effect using likelihood ratio test in Murrah buffaloes. Data from 614 Murrah buffaloes related to production traits were collected from history pedigree sheets maintained at the buffalo farm, Department of Livestock Production and Management (LPM), LUVAS, Hisar. The production traits under this study were 305 days milk yield (305DMY), peak yield (PY), lactation length (LL), dry period (DP), lactation milk yield (LMY) and wet average (WA). The heritability estimates were in the range of 0.33–0.44 for 305DMY, 0.25–0.51 for PY, 0.05–0.13 for LL, 0.03–0.23 for DP, 0.17–0.40 for LMY and 0.37–0.66 for WA. Model 1 was considered best for most of the traits, viz., 305DMY, PY, LL, LMY and WA followed by model 2 for DP. Covariance and correlated values within the traits caused inflation of heritability in model 3 and model 6. The maximum covariance between the additive and maternal effect was found in trait LMY, which was 14,183.90 in model 3 and the minimum value was also reported in the same trait for model 6, valued at −3522.37. Multivariate analysis showed that all production traits were moderate to high and positively correlated with each other except for DP, which was low and negative genetic and phenotypic correlated. Spearman's rank correlation coefficients of breeding value among all six models were high and significant, ranged from 0.78 to 1.00 for all the traits except DP, therefore any of the models could be taken into account depending upon the availability of data.