The consistency of quail's egg production supplemented with vitamin C in the diets

摘要

In tropical area,animals are prone to stress due to high environmental temperature hence affecting the production.Vitamin C has been offered as an agent to help animal to cope with heat stress.This paper aimed to estimate the consistency of quail's egg production supplemented with vitamin C through repeatability estimates.A total of 136 quails (Coturnix coturnix japonica) were randomly allotted into 2 dietary treatments with 4 replicates each containing 17 quails.The dietary treatments were basal diet (TO) and basal diet + 250 mg/kg vitamin C (Tl).Dietary treatments were given for 8 weeks in laying phase.In total we obtained 56 days of egg production data.Data were analysed using t-test to infer the differences between the treatments and analysis of variance (ANOVA) to obtain the repeatability value.The results showed that the supplementation of vitamin C increased egg production up to 14.3% (P<0.01).Repeatability value of TO was higher (0.33) than Tl (-0.13).Quails given TO has a high egg production consistency but produce lower egg production than T1.It is concluded that supplementation of vitamin C increased egg production but were not yet able to produce the optimal consistency.