Growth pattern of Japanese quail under Indian conditions 1. CARI Uttam, CARI Ujjawal and their crosses

The average body weight of male birds of four genotypes of Japanese quail viz. CARI Uttam, CARI Ujjawal, CARI Uttam × CARI Ujjawal and CARI Ujjawal × CARI Uttam maintained at this Institute were 22.60±0.47 g, 24.07±0.57 g, 22.30±0.43 g and 25.18±0.53 g respectively at 1st week and attained 210.52±1.95 g, 223.88±2.71 g, 209.80±2.24 g and 223.03±2.21 g, respectively at 10^th week of age. The corresponding average weight of female birds at 1st week were 22.56±0.43 g, 24.67±0.49 g, 23.04±0.49 g and 25.66±0.66 g and attained 225.95±1.97 g, 236.40±2.65 g, 221.10±2.23 g and 235.01±2.20 g, respectively at 10^th week. The average body weights of these genotype differed significantly at all ages except 7^th and 8^th week in males and 8^th week in females. There was highest weight gain during 5^th week of age. Growth models namely quadratic, modified exponential, logistic, Gompertz, modified logistic and Bertalanffy models were fitted to their weekly body weights. On the basis of three measure of goodness of fit namely R², mean square error and mean absolute error, Gompertz model was found best to describe the growth pattern of all these genotypes.