| Dissertation note |
Light play an important role in controlling the age at sexual maturity in birds. Among various managemental aspects, light management is the basic one. Attaining sexual maturity at an appropriate age and weight is the key to reproductive success and the present study was an effort in the same direction. To develop specific practice for quail production and to optimize the best age for photo-stimulation present experiment was conducted. In total 225 females and 75 males of 5 week old were studied. A completely randomized design with three treatment of 5 replicates with 15 female and 5 male each, was applied. Treatment consisted 3 different ages of photo-stimulation (30, 35 and 40 days). Production performance (body weight, feed intake, egg production, feed conversion ratio and livability), egg characteristics (egg weight, shell thickness, yolk index and Haugh unit) and hatching traits (infertile, hatchability, dead germ, dead in shell percent and hatchling body weight) were evaluated. This has been observed in the study that photo-stimulating the birds at 40 days of age influenced positively egg production % with longest consistent peak, number of eggs, FCR / dozen eggs and FCR/Kg egg mass. Birds stimulated at 40 days of age showed better hatchability and very low dead in germ percentage. It was concluded that photo-stimulation at 40 days of age not only significantly improves productive, reproductive and egg quality traits but also gives the consistency in all respects of these traits. |
