PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS OF MORPHOLOGICAL TRAITS OF HARINGHATA BLACK CHICKENS IN AN ORGANIZED FARM

The present study was conducted to explore the relationship among body measurement in Haringhata Black Chicken using principal component analysis keeping in view of identifying those components that define body conformation in this breed. The parameters body weight, breast girth, keel length, body length, ornithological measurement, beak length, beak width and back length were recorded and evaluated on 22nd week of age of 113 Chicken. The data showed that the mean body weight was 963 gm and the body measurements were 23.96 cm, 9.80 cm, 59.27 cm, 51.14 cm, 2.38 cm, 1.40 cm and 9.79 cm for breast girth, keel length, body length, ornithological measurement, beak length, beak width and back length at 22nd week of age, respectively. The highest correlation was obtained between body weight and body length (r = 0.86), body length and ornithological measurement (r = 0.86) while correlation between beak width and ornithological measurement (r = 0.26) was observed to be the lowest. Extracted two principal components PC 1 and PC 2 explained 75.70 % of the total variation in the original variables. The first principal component (PC 1) had the largest share (60.02 %) of the total variance and had high positive loadings on body weight (0.93), body length (0.89), ornithological measurement (0.88), breast girth (0.86) and keel length (0.85) while PC 2 shared only 15.68% of the total variance with high positive loadings on beak width (0.75) and beak length (0.68). Therefore, PC1 may be used as selection criteria for improving body weight of indigenous Haringhata Black chicken.