Breeding Biology of Muscovy Duck (Cairina moschata) Under Natural Incubation: the Use of the Weibull Function and a Beta-binomial Model to Predict Nest Hatchability

In this paper we tested the Weibull function and beta-binomial distribution to analyse and predict nest hatchability, using empirical data on hatchability in Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata) eggs under natural incubation (932 successfully incubated nests and 11 822 eggs). The estimated parameters of the Weibull function and beta-binomial model were compared with the logistic regression analysis. The maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters was used to quantify simultaneously the influence of the nesting behaviour and the duration of the reproduction cycle on hatchability. The estimated parameters showed that the hatchability was not affected in natural dump nests, but in artificial dump nests and in nests with non-term eggs the hatchability was reduced by 10 and 25%, respectively. Similar results were obtained using logistic regression. Both models provided a satisfactory description of the observed data set, but the beta-binomial model proved to have more parameters with practical and biological meaningful interpretations, because this model is able to quantify and incorporate the unexplained variation in a single parameter θ (which is a variance measure).