FERTILITY AND HATCHABILITY OF DIALLEL CROSSES BETWEEN NOILER AND NIGERIAN HEAVY ECOTYPE CHICKENS

Abstract

Nsukka Region is an agrigarian community, noted for livestock production especially poultry business, there is no current work on Noiler breed combinations crossing with local chickens (Heavy Ecotypes) to identify the best combiners apart from the other studies on the performance of the individual cross breeds. Therefore this experiment was carried out to evaluate the fertility and hatchability of diallel crosses and reproduction traits of Noilers and Nigerian heavy ecotype chickens for possible genetic improvements of production traits. A total of 70 birds comprising of 5 noiler cocks (nc) and 30 noiler hens (nh), five heavy ecotype cocks (hc) and 30 heavy ecotype hens (hh) in the mating ratio of 1:5. The birds were arranged in four breeding groups or genotypes thus nc x nh (NN), hc x hh (HH), nc x hh (NH) and hc x nh (HN). The cocks were trained for semen collection and
artificial insemination was used for breeding. Eggs laid were collected according to breeding groups and were set and hatched for growth traits studies. Data collected were subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results indicated significant (P<0.05) effect of genotype on fertility and hatchability of eggs in which the Percentage fertility across the genotypes were 57%, 29%, 61% and 37%, while hatchability was 74, 47, 72 and 49%, for the genotypes NN, HH, NH and HH respectively. The genotypes NH had higher egg weight of 47.33 and 46.03 than HH and HN with egg weights of 43.70 and 44.43 respectively. The findings showed that breeding local pullets with local cocks of noiler improved fertility and hatchability.