Estimated reproductive success of brooders and heritability of growth traits for large yellow croaker (Larimichthys crocea) using microsatellites

We estimated the reproductive success of adult brood fish and the heritability of growth-related traits for large yellow croaker (Larimichthys crocea). We created two independent full-factorial cross groups (1 and 2) by crossing 4 malesx4 females and 4 malesx3 females, respectively. We measured the body weight (BW), body length (BL), and body height (BH) of 281 individuals from group 1 and 318 individuals from group 2 at 20 months post hatch (harvest age). We also collected a tissue sample from each individual. The parents and offspring were genotyped using six polymorphic microsatellites. Of the 599 offspring, 99.2% were assigned to a single pair of parents. In both groups, some parent pairs produced a large number of offsprings while other pairs did not produce any offspring. The genetic diversity and putative N (e) were lower in the offsprings than in the parents in both groups. The heritability estimates at 20-month age were 0.13 +/- 0.10 for BW, 0.19 +/- 0.13 for BL, and 0.09 +/- 0.06 for BH. The genetic and phenotype correlation between BW, BL, and BH was close to 1. The results provide basic information for selective breeding and further genetic characterization of large yellow croaker.