Genetic parameters of vulva traits and impact of vulva scores on gilts culling in Large White pigs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Study explores the genetic parameters of vulva traits in Large White pigs. • Vulva traits, including width and angle, influence culling risk in gilts. • Heritability of vulva traits varies, with width showing the highest value. • Larger vulva widths are linked to a lower risk of culling due to prolonged oestrus. • Findings support integrating vulva traits in gilt breeding for improved efficiency. Vulva morphologies represent significant traits in pig production. Recent studies suggest that vulva size can be predictive of the reproductive performance of gilts. This study aimed to analyse the genetic parameters of vulva traits, including vulva length, vulva width, and vulva angle score ( VAS ), as well as litter traits, including total number born, number born alive, number stillborn, and piglet survival rate, across three Large White pig strains (PIC, Topigs, and Canadian). We estimated the correlations between vulva traits and litter performance, as well as the reasons for culling gilts. In this study, single-trait and multitrait models were employed to estimate the heritability and genetic correlations between vulva and litter traits. The heritabilities of vulva traits ranged from 0.167 to 0.426, whereas the heritability of litter traits ranged from 0.013 to 0.147. The VAS in Topigs Large White pigs exhibited the highest heritability. The genetic correlation coefficients between vulva length and width in PIC and Topigs Large White pigs were significantly positively correlated, ranged from 0.585 to 0.767. No significant correlation was found between vulva and litter traits. Subsequently, we scored the vulva traits according to previously reported studies, linear relationship analysis between vulva score and reasons for culling gilts revealed that gilts with larger vulva widths had a lower risk of culling. The average vulva width score of the gilts that were culled due to prolonged oestrus was significantly lower (2.75) compared to that of gilts with normal oestrus (2.90). In the population of gilts aged 220–230 days, the gilts with higher vulva angle scores had a lower risk of culling due to vulva inflammation with purulent discharge. The results suggest that selecting vulva traits in replacement gilts is an effective strategy to reduce gilt culling rates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".