Study of the live body weight and body characteristics of the African Muscovy duck (Caraina moschata).

Three hundred and twenty 1-week old ducklings (160 males and 160 females) were used to evaluate the body weight, body parts and carcass characteristics of the African Muscovy duck. Sexual dimorphism was in favour of the male for all the parameters throughout the experimental period, however the difference was significant (P<0.05) only after week 2. The 12-week old male weighed 1832.0+/-180.4 g while the female reached only 68.2% of the male weight. Metatarsus diameter, thoracic perimeter, body length, length of bill, foot and wing in cm were respectively 1.3, 29.5, 57.5, 7.0, 27.1 and 27.8 for the male as compared with 1.2, 25.8, 51.0, 6.3, 23.3 and 26.9 for the female. Body measurements were highly (P<0.01) correlated with body weight for both sexes, however the highest correlation coefficients were obtained with wing length (0.990 and 0.995) and thoracic perimeter (0.993 and 0.973) for female and male respectively. Live body weight had a linear relationship with both wing length (R2=0.991 and 0.81) and thoracic perimeter (R2=0.948 and 0.986) for male and female respectively. The female duck yielded higher percent ready-to-cook carcass (66.3%), breast (13.6%), liver (2.8%), heart (1.5%) and gizzard (3.8%) as compared to the male (65.0%, 12.0%, 2.5%, 1.1% and 3.4% respectively) although the difference was not significant (P>0.05). The male small intestine (185.1+/-3.4 cm), colon (14.8+/-1.0 cm) and caecum (17.9+/-0.4 cm) were significantly (P<0.05) longer than that of the female (152.2+/-1.8, 10.8+/-0.7 and 14.85+/-0.6 cm respectively).