Udder Diversity: A Genetic Exploitation across Cattle Breeds under Extensive Management System in Nigeria

Özet

This study investigates the genetic diversity of udder traits in three prominent Nigerian cattle breeds: Red Bororo, White Fulani, and Sokoto Gudali, all raised under extensive management systems. A total of 270 cows, 90 from each breed were used for the study. Mahalanobis squared distances (D²⁾ were calculated to quantify the genetic divergence between breeds within the same location. The results revealed that Wilks Lambda (0.349, 0.910) and Bartlett's test chi-square were 84.823 at the level of significance (p<0.001) for function 1 and 7.597 at the level of significance (p<0.05) for function 2, which provides validity for the canonical discriminant analysis. The percentage of share variance of 94.20 in function 1 is higher than 69.16 in function 2. The canonical correlation of function 1 is also higher (0.785) than 0.300 in function 2. Standardized Canonical Discriminant Function Coefficients showed that hind teat length (0.966) was the highest, followed by udder length (0.549) and udder depth (0.348) in their standardized canonical discriminant coefficients in function 1, whereas udder length had the highest (0.883), followed by front teat length (1.321) in function 2. The pairwise genetic distance between Sokoto Gudali and Red Bororo was 34.713 at the 0.001 significance level, Sokoto Gudali and White Fulani were 45.428 at the 0.001 significance level, and 1.995 was the genetic distance between Red Bororo and White Fulani at the 0.143 significance level.  The study has explored the possibility of exploiting this udder diversity for breeding purposes or to improve milk production in these systems.