Abstract

Monozygotic (identical) twins have for many years been used to increase the statistical power of experiments in a range of scientific disciplines (Dick and Whittle,1951). In dairy cows, variation within identical twinsets for a given biological parameter is usually substantially less than the variation between unrelated cows or between fraternal twinsets (Hancock 1953; Brumby and Hancock, 1956). Thus the number of identical twins required in an experiment is often considerably less than the number of unrelated cows necessary to achieve the same statistical precision. The experiments described here were conducted to quantify the twin efficiency values of a range of milk composition parameters.

MJ, Auldist, TR Mackle, RJ Hooper, and HV Henderson

Proceedings of the New Zealand Society of Animal Production, Volume 58, , 55, 1998