ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Anim. Sci.
Sec. Precision Livestock Farming
This article is part of the Research TopicSustainable and Climate Resilient Livestock SystemsView all 11 articles
Variation in body weight and feed intake trajectories are promising resilience indicators in Texel lambs
Provisionally accepted
- 1Instituto Nacional de Investigacion Agropecuaria Tacuarembo, Tacuarembo, Uruguay
- 2Universidad de la Republica Uruguay, Montevideo, Uruguay
- 3Instituto Nacional de Investigacion Agropecuaria, Canelones, Uruguay
- 4Purdue University Department of Animal Sciences, West Lafayette, United States
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Resilient animals are capable of coping with environmental perturbations or quickly returning to unperturbed performance trajectory after facing challenges. More resilient animals tend to have better welfare, health, and productivity under variable conditions. However, trade-offs between production and resilience traits have been reported, indicating the need for further research to enable genetic selection for increased productive efficiency while maintaining or improving general resilience. In this study, data from 76 Texel lambs monitored during a 53-day feed efficiency trial were used to generate 24 indicators of resilience based on variability in daily feed intake (FI), feeding behavior and average daily gain (ADG) and assess their phenotypic relationship with ADG and residual FI (RFI). Some traits evaluated included adgVar (residual variance of ADG), adgLnVar (log-variance of deviation between observed absolute and expected ADG), QRfi (quantile regression of FI), and QRdurfi (quantile regression of duration with effective consumption). Strong associations were found between indicators, such as adgVar and adgLnVar (r = 0.81). Productive traits showed two clear patterns, ADG was favorably correlated with QRdur (r = -0.53), QRdurfi (r = -0.65), QRfi (r = -0.65), suggesting that more resilient animals tend to have higher ADG. Conversely, RFI presented unfavorable correlations with resilience, ranging from r = -0.46 for QRfi to r = -0.24 for QRtimesfi indicating that more feed-efficient animals may be less resilient. These contrasting results highlight two key findings: (1) productivity and resilience can be favorably associated, as shown by ADG-resilience correlations, however, (2) specific feed efficiency indicators (e.g., RFI) may have antagonistic relationships with resilience. Given the relatively small sample size (n = 76) in this exploratory study, findings should be interpretated with caution but can provide some insights into the relation between resilience and production and potential trade-offs warranting further investigation.
Keywords: Environmental challenge, feed consumption variability, longitudinal data, robustness, Sheep, Stress coping
Received: 19 Aug 2025; Accepted: 11 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Barchet, Ciappesoni, Brito and De Barbieri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Fernanda Barchet, fernandabarchet2340@gmail.com
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