Research Article Open Access

Participatory Approaches to Derive Consensus on Desired Genetic Gains for Rainbow Trout Breeding Objective in Iran

Abstract

The Rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is one of the most important farmed fish in Iran, which holds high economic value as a source of meat. The purpose of this study was to define desired genetic gains for the important traits of this fish using an analytic hierarchy process and a weighted goal programming. Therefore, two questionnaires were sent out to 174 trout farmers in Iran. The first questionnaire included management factors and farming environments. In this questionnaire, farmers were asked to choose 6 important traits in rainbow trout among 14 economic traits for genetic improvement. In the second questionnaire, priorities of the 6 traits with the highest value were obtained using pair-wise comparison. The results showed that the 6 most important traits were Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR), Thermal Growth Coefficient (TGC), Harvest Weight (HW), Uniformity (U), Late Maturity (LM) and Deformity (D). Medians of the best individual preference values were FCR (0.29), TGC (0.24), HW (0.17), LM (0.13), U (0.09) and D (0.06). Most disagreements were found between the social group preference values in the water temperature, commercial products and water source categories. Desired genetic gains were 2.25, 1.43, 1.20, 1.04, 0.38 and 0.03% for FCR, LM, TGC, HW, D and U respectively. Consensus preferences can be used to obtain a single compromise breeding objective for situations where the same genetic resources are produced under different environmental and management conditions.

Mina Rahbar*, Roghieh Safari