Abstract:
Growth is one of the well-known features in biological creatures.
The evolution of body weight during growth is of particular importance in both
breeding and management. In the present study, the adequacy of 11 mathematica
l functions, (Gompertz, Richards, Logistic, Bertalanffy, Brody, Negative Exponential,
Morgan-Mercer Flodin and three Hyperbolastic models) used to model growth characteristics
of Japanese quails were compared. For this purpose, the live-weight data obtained
weekly from 499 quails were fitted to aforementioned non-linear models. The
results of the analysis indicated that the Gompertz model is the most appropriate
one in terms of goodness of fit criteria (R2 = 0.99998, R