
Heritability of various
production
traits in poultry
A
heritabiliy of 0.5 indicates that
one-half the
phenotypic variance is attributable to genotypic variance,
thus
selective breeding has the potential to provide significant
improvement
the production trait. Note that 'Egg
Quality' characters are often highly heritable,
whereas 'Egg Production'
traits under mass
rearing are not. Likewise, 'Viability'
characters show very low heritability: this indicates a large
environmental influence, and for example that
respiratory diseases are best approached as questions for
sanitation or antibiotic treatment.