Abstract

The association between live body weight and morphometric traits plays a major role in the daily management and improvement of poultry. The objective of the current study was to determine the association between morphometric features and live body weight, as well as to investigate the direct and indirect effects of morphometric traits on White Leghorn laying hens’ live body weight. Live body weight (BW) and morphometric traits including shank circumference (SC), body length (BL), wing length (WL), shank length (SL), toe to back length (TBL), beak length (BKL), beak to comb length (BCL), height (CH) and chest girth (CG) were collected from one hundred (n = 100) White Leghorn laying hens aged 40 weeks. The correlation findings showed that BW was positively correlated to SL, WL, SC, BL, and CH (p < 0.05). The Path analysis results reported that BL (0.45) had the highest direct effect on BW while WL (0.14) had the highest indirect effect on BW via BL. Correlation results propose that improvement of BL, SL, SC, CG and CH might increase the BW of White Leghorn hens. Path analysis results, on the other hand, imply that BL and SC may be used as selection basis during breeding to improve BW in chickens. This study suggests that BW of White Leghorn is correlated with some morphometric traits that might be used during breeding. The findings also suggest that body length directly influences the live body weight of White Leghorn chicken breed. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2024