Background The effects of environmental disturbances on livestock are often observed indirectly through the variability patterns of repeated performance records over time. Sheep are frequently exposed to diverse extensive environments but currently lack appropriate measures of resilience (or sensitivity) towards environmental disturbance. In this study, random regression models were used to analyse repeated records of the fbre diameter of wool taken along the wool staple (bundle of wool fbres) to investigate how the genetic and environmental variance of fbre diameter changes with different growing environments.
Results A model containing a fifth, fourth and second-order Legendre polynomial applied to the fixed, additive and permanent environmental effects, respectively, was optimal for modeling fbre diameter along the wool staple. The additive genetic and permanent environmental variance both showed variability across the staple length trajectory. The ranking of sire estimated breeding values (EBV) for fbre diameter was shown to change along the staple and the genetic correlations decreased as the distance between measurements along the staple increased. This result suggests that some genotypes were potentially more resilient towards the changes in the growing environment compared to others. In addition, the eigenfunctions of the random regression model implied the ability to change the fbre diameter trajectory to reduce its variability along the wool staple.
Conclusions These Results show that genetic variation in fbre diameter measured along the wool staple exists and this could be used to provide greater insight into the ability to select for resilience in extensively raised sheep populations.