Swine

Genetic parameters for resilience-related feed intake and feeding behaviors in Canadian Duroc pigs

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Abstract

Resilience, defined as the ability to maintain performance under environmental or physiological stress, is a key trait for sustainable and efficient pig production. Identifying suitable phenotypes associated with resilience is an essential step in enhancing pig resilience via selective breeding. Fluctuations in daily feed intake (DFI) and time spent in the feeder per day (TPD), measured using the root mean square error (RMSE) and quantile regression (QR), have been suggested as resilience indicators in several studies. This study aimed to quantify resilience indicators derived from DFI and TPD and to estimate their heritability and genetic correlations with growth and feed efficiency traits in Canadian Duroc pigs. Feed intake and feeding behaviour data were collected from 19,591 Duroc pigs raised at 13 farms operated by the Pig Improvement Company (PIC) in Quebec, Canada. Data were analyzed to derive resilience traits, which included RMSE values from individual regressions of DFI and TPD on age (RMSEDFI and RMSETPD), capturing within-animal variability, and quantile regression-based traits (QRDFI and QRTPD), defined as the proportion of days with negative residuals below the 5% quantile regression line of DFI or TPD on age across the population. Univariate analysis showed that variability in resilience traits was significantly (P TPD to 0.33±0.02 for RMSETPD. Positive genetic correlations were observed between RMSEDFI and DFI (0.35), and between RMSEDFI and feed efficiency traits: feed conversion ratio (FCR, 0.52) and residual feed intake (RFI, 0.50). Both QRDFI and QRTPD showed low-to-moderate genetic correlations with DFI (-0.34 and -0.06, respectively) and feed efficiency traits (-0.43 and 0.09 with RFI; -0.53 and 0.14 with FCR, respectively). These findings highlight the potential value of including RMSE-based resilience indicators into selection indices to improve both resilience and feed efficiency. Future work will focus on estimating genetic correlations between resilience traits and key growth and performance traits.

Keywords: 2026

How to Cite:

Do, D., Kim, B., Jafarikia, M., Tulpan, D., Adewole, D., Plastow, G., Sullivan, B., Holl, J. & Miar, Y., (2026) “Genetic parameters for resilience-related feed intake and feeding behaviors in Canadian Duroc pigs”, World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production Digital Archive 2026(1): 2284690. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/wcgalp.23611

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