Genetic Inheritance of Female and Male Morphotypes in Giant Freshwater Prawn Macrobrachium rosenbergii

Giant freshwater prawn (GFP) Macrobrachium rosenbergii is unique with males categorized in five different morphotypes (small claw, orange claw, blue claw, old blue claw and no claw males) and females in three reproductive statuses (mature ovary, berried and spawned females). In the present study we examined genetic inheritance of female and male morphotypes, their body weights and genetic associations between morphotypes and body traits. Restricted maximum likelihood fitting a multi-trait animal model was performed on a total of 21,459 body records collected over five generations in a GFP population selected for high growth rate. The estimates of variance components showed that there were substantial differences in additive genetic variance in body weight between male morphotypes. The low and significantly different from one genetic correlations between the expressions of body weight in male morphotypes also suggest that these traits should be treated as genetically different traits in selective breeding programs. By contrast, body weights of female types are essentially the same characters as indicated by the high genetic correlations between homologous trait expressions. In addition to body weight, male morphotypes and female reproductive statuses were treated as traits in themselves and were analysed as binary observations using animal and sire linear mixed models, and logit and probit threshold models. The estimates of heritability back-transformed from the liability scale were in good agreement with those obtained from linear mixed models, ranging from 0.02 to 0.43 for male morphotypes and 0.06 to 0.10 for female types. The genetic correlations among male morphoptypes were generally favourable. Body weight showed negative genetic associations with SM (−0.96), whereas those of body weight with other male morphotypes were positive (0.25 to 0.76). Our results showed that there is existence of heritable (additive genetic) component for male morphotypes, giving prospects for genetic selection to change population structure of GFP.