Allometric Growth in Brazilian Naturalized Pigs

Abstract

The allometric growth of male and female naturalized pig breeds (Nilo, Piau, Moura, and Monteiro) was evaluated regarding hip height, snout length, and head length using the allometric equation. Body measurements generally show later growth in relation to the snout length and earlier growth in relation to the head length and hip height. When comparing breeds of pigs, female Moura animals showed later growth of the characteristics linked to muscle (thoracic circumference, body length, and longitudinal diameter) than of head length. Nilo females showed characteristics such as shoulder length, rump length and interschiadic distance earlier than snout length. There were differences between the breed and gender in terms of development times for the different parts of the body, showing that breeding systems and use of these animals have to be specific for each breed.

Sexual Allometric Monomorphism in Araucan Pig from Colombia: Preliminary Results

“…An investment of males in increasing size would be only needed if it would provide advantages during fights with other males, and possibly during courtship and mating, but as herds are maintained in open herds, they remain very isolated from neighbor groups and territoriality is not necessary. Similar allometries for both genders within a breed, but differing between breeds, have been obtained by other authors for other swine creole breeds [ 9 ].…”

“…Allometric growth studies examine the relative growth of a body component relative to a collection of other components, being an effective manner to study their development [ 6 , 7 , 8 ]. Morphometric measurements performed on animals provide additional information that is useful for determining phenotypic and genetic trends of growth of animals over the years [ 9 ]. Broadly, allometry has been suggested as having an influential impact on sexual shape dimorphism [ 10 ].…”

“…Iberoamerica has a great number of animals completely adapted to local conditions whose production is sustainable and ecological in all its phases, and whose product has a high nutritional value [ 11 ]. Known as “Creoles”, the pigs were not introduced to Colombia until the 16th century [ 9 , 12 ]. There they underwent hundreds of years of natural selection on the basis of adaptation to local environmental characteristics [ 13 , 14 ], which included survival and reproduction in geographical areas of tropical climates [ 11 ].…”

“…This study aimed to evaluate the allometric growth of the Araucan pig breed, a local Colombian breed, in relation to different quantitative traits and considering genders separately. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time this topic has been analyzed for this population, although it has been done for other Creole pigs [ 9 ].…”

Depicting latent variables considering different pig genetics and nutritional plans in crossbred pigs

“…Most of the studies regarding quantitative traits in pigs have numerous variables (Argemí-Armengol et al, 2019;Formenton et al, 2019;Veloso et al, 2019) that commonly are highly correlated, and the use of those variables for univariate analysis may have outcomes that are difficult to interpret. Thus, multivariate methods enable an easier understanding of their results.…”