The objective of this study was to estimate the variance components for body weight in Japanese quails by Bayesian procedures. The body weight at hatch (BWH) and at 7 (BW07), 14 (BW14), 21 (BW21) and 28 days of age (BW28) of 3,520 quails was recorded from August 2001 to June 2002. A multiple-trait animal model with additive genetic, maternal environment and residual effects was implemented by Gibbs sampling methodology. A single Gibbs sampling with 80,000 rounds was generated by the program MTGSAM (Multiple Trait Gibbs Sampling in Animal Model). Normal and inverted Wishart distributions were used as prior distributions for the random effects and the variance components, respectively. Variance components were estimated based on the 500 samples that were left after elimination of 30,000 rounds in the burn-in period and 100 rounds of each thinning interval. The posterior means of additive genetic variance components were 0.15; 4.18; 14.62; 27.18 and 32.68; the posterior means of maternal environment variance components were 0.23; 1.29; 2.76; 4.12 and 5.16; and the posterior means of residual variance components were 0.084; 6.43; 22.66; 31.21 and 30.85, at hatch, 7, 14, 21 and 28 days old, respectively. The posterior means of heritability were 0.33; 0.35; 0.36; 0.43 and 0.47 at hatch, 7, 14, 21 and 28 days old, respectively. These results indicate that heritability increased with age. On the other hand, after hatch there was a marked reduction in the maternal environment variance proportion of the phenotypic variance, whose estimates were 0.50; 0.11; 0.07; 0.07 and 0.08 for BWH, BW07, BW14, BW21 and BW28, respectively. The genetic correlation between weights at different ages was high, except for those estimates between BWH and weight at other ages. Changes in body weight of quails can be efficiently achieved by selection.
Bayesian inference; heritability; maternal environment
