Heritability of skeleton abnormalities (lordosis, lack of operculum) in gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata) supported by microsatellite family data

Body abnormalities constitute an important problem to fish aquaculture. Pigmentation, scale and skeleton abnormalities have been reported in different cultured fish species. Environmental and genetic factors or their interaction have been suggested to explain their origin. Gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata) is one of the most important European cultured species. Lordosis and lack of operculum are common abnormalities in this species, and can reach frequency of 80% or more of commercial batches. In spite of an important body of data suggesting environmental factors related with their origin, scarce and not conclusive genetic data have been reported to date. In our study, a large number of families originating from the usual production process of a commercial farm were used to estimate the heritabilities of both characters. Two independent experiments were carried out for each abnormality. Nine hundred and ninety four (5.6% lordotics; 157 full-sib families; 6.3 offspring/family) and 808 (7.9% lacking operculum; 83 families; 9.7 offspring/family) individuals were used for lordosis and lacking operculum heritability estimations, respectively. The results obtained adjusting an animal model indicated non significant heritabilities for both characters (0.021 (s.e. 0.019) and 0.032 (s.e. 0.023) for lordosis and lack of operculum, respectively). The corresponding values when a threshold model was used, though higher (0.152 and 0.203, respectively), evidenced large standard errors (0.119 and 0.146, respectively) suggesting h2 = 0 as the most confident hypothesis (P = 0.838 and 0.766, respectively). A non-parametric permutation test was also applied to evaluate if more related individuals had a higher phenotypic resemblance. The results obtained suggested only a slight familiar association (P < 0.05) when comparing individuals lacking operculum, but neither between lordotics nor between normal ones. These results suggest that most phenotypic variation observed for lordosis and lack of operculum in gilthead seabream is due to environmental factors.