Is sex determination in Merinos heritable?

Abstract

<p>This paper investigates the ability of different linear mixed models to estimate the heritability of sex determination in a sub-set of the Australian Merino population. The dataset used was from Centre Plus Merinos in central-west New South Wales with 25 plus years of full pedigree collection and over 20,000 lambing events where the sex of the progeny were recorded. This study used sex of a lamb as a trait, (i.e. zero phenotype for female and one phenotype for male). We observed a significant, yet normal, amount of phenotypic variation in the sex ratio of progeny for dams, sires, maternal grand sires and maternal grand dams. However, no model was able to estimate significant genetic variation in sex determination and failed to return a heritability above 0.01. Consequently, it can be concluded within this dataset that it would not be possible to select to alter sex determination in Merinos.</p>