Multivariate principal components analysis of the morphostructural traits of West African Dwarf sheep

Abstract

A study was conducted to determine the interdependence among conformation traits of 178 West African Dwarf sheep and to predict body weight from their independent scores using principal components analysis. Body weight and nine morphostructural traits: height at withers, body length, heart girth, rump height, hip width, chest depth, fore canon bone length, tail length, and ear length were measured. Phenotypic correlation coefficients between body weight and body dimensions ranged from 0.78 to 0.79. Anti-image correlations of the body shape characters showed that partial correlations were low. Two principal components were extracted from the factor analysis with varimax rotation of the inter-correlated traits which accounted for 69.50% of the total variance. The first principal component (PC1) explained 57.70% and second principal component (PC2) contributed 11.70% of the variance. Both PC1 and PC2 could be considered in the selection programme to obtain animals with better conformations using minimal number of measurements.