Thrombin as a Potential Proxy to Select for Horn Fly Abundance in Beef Cattle

Horn flies are a major nuisance to cattle and induce significant economic losses. Fly abundance varies within and across breeds and genetic analyses have shown sufficient genetic variation to permit selection. A major bottleneck for selecting against horn fly abundance is the complexity of measuring...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Animals (Basel) 2022-10, Vol.12 (21), p.2982
Main Authors: Warner, Amanda, Ling, Ashley, Krause, Taylor, Heins, Bradley, Hinkle, Nancy, Pringle, Dean, Aggrey, Samuel E., Rekaya, Romdhane
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abundance
Animal husbandry
Animals
Beef
Beef cattle
Blood coagulation
Breeding
Cattle
Control methods
Data collection
Economic impact
Genetic analysis
Genetic diversity
genetic selection
Haematobia irritans
Heritability
horn flies
Impact analysis
Insecticide resistance
Insecticides
Livestock
Nuisance
Pasture
Phenotypes
Thrombin
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Summary:Horn flies are a major nuisance to cattle and induce significant economic losses. Fly abundance varies within and across breeds and genetic analyses have shown sufficient genetic variation to permit selection. A major bottleneck for selecting against horn fly abundance is the complexity of measuring fly attraction phenotypes. Easy-to-measure proxy phenotypes could be an attractive option to indirectly estimate fly abundance. In the current study, thrombin was investigated as a potential proxy to assess fly abundance. Fly counts and blood samples were collected on 355 cows. Pearson correlation between subjective fly count and thrombin was −0.13, indicating a decrease in fly abundance with the increase in thrombin concentration. When thrombin was discretized into three classes, there was a 22% difference in fly count between the top and bottom classes. Heritability estimates of thrombin were 0.38 and 0.39 using linear and threshold models, respectively. The correlation between estimated thrombin breeding values and fly count was around −0.18. There was a noticeably lower density of high fly counts among animals with high breeding values for thrombin. These results indicate that thrombin could be used in combination with other biological factors to estimate fly abundance and as a proxy for selection against fly abundance.
ISSN:2076-2615
2076-2615
DOI:10.3390/ani12212982