GENETIC AND PHENOTYPIC CHARACTERISATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL TRAITS OF YANKASA SHEEP IN KADUNA STATE

Abstract

Variation in ordinal traits such as head profile, coat color, ear size, ear attitude and nominal attributes such as presence and absence of wattles and horn could be of tremendous assistance in generating breed interspecific variations among animal populations within the species. Thus, the aim of this study was to determine and document the genetic and phenotypic profiles of Yankasa sheep by generating the phenotypic and allelic frequencies of some morphological traits whose modes of
inheritance are known. Five morphological traits which included head profile, ear attitude, horn, wattle and coat pigment were observed and categorized from 120 Yankasa sheep comprising 60 females and 60 males. The result showed that head profile of Yankasa sheep was mainly sub-convex (80%), ear size and attitude were medium (85%) and drooping (93.33%), respectively. The frequency of presence of wattle was 18.33%. Presence of horn was associated with rams (90%). Yankasa sheep were spotted with black (96.7%) and brown (3.33%). The gene frequency for the dominant alleles were 0.800, 0.933, 0.817, 0.976, 0.900 and 0.967 for head profile, ear attitude, wattle, horn in females, horn in males and coat pigment respectively. These values are quite higher than the expected Mendelian value of 0.75.