Data of body weight and conformation measures (i.e. length of keel, KL; shank, SL and breast width, BRW) of 1103 Mehallah 85 turkey offspring were analyzed using Restricted Maximum Likelihood (REML) under Mixed Model Equations. Best Linear Unbiased Estimates (BLUE) included the effects of hatch; sex and hatch X sex interaction along with unrelated 28 sires as a random effect. The respective 16 wk. of age BW, KL, SL & BRW overall Best Linear Unbiased Estimates (BLUE) for Mehallah 85 were 6095.5 g, 131.92 mm, 156.92 mm and 207.65 mm. The Sire model included the following fixed effects: Hatch (H); Sex (S) and Hatch X Sex interaction (H X S). All the fixed effects and their interactions were highly significant (P< 0.0001) regarding the traits under consideration.
Transmitting ability (TA) estimates of Mehallah 85 turkey at 16 wk. of age ranged from –561.26 to 389.28 g. (range = 950.54 g.) for BW; -3.62 to 3.97 mm. (7.59 mm.) for KL; -7.73 to 7.00 mm. (14.73 mm.) for SL and –8.20 to 6.70 mm. (14.91 mm.) for BRW. The range for the top 30% ranked sires were 270.45 g., 3.54 mm., 5.72 mm. and 5.31 mm. for BW, KL, SL and BRW, respectively. However, the number of sires having positive TA records reached about > 50% from the tested individuals at each of the considered trait.
The product moment correlation coefficient concerning sire transmitting ability and the Spearman correlation coefficient concerning ranks of sire transmitting ability were generally weak and insignificant among all traits except that between BW and BRW where the two correlation sorts were highly significant (P< 0.0001) being 0.878 and 0.863, respectively.
Heritability estimates were relatively intermediate and ranged between 0.2655 - 0.3751 and the percentage sire variance component (ss%) ranged between 13.27 – 18.76% in the turkey herd under study.