Fig 1.
Schematic representation of experimental timeline and animal management during the experiment.
Table 1.
The effect of supplement intake (X)1 and weaning weight on liveweight gain (LWG), hip height gain (HHG) and hip width gain (HWG) of early (EW) and normally (NW) weaned2 crossbred Brahman heifers.
Table 2.
Hay (HI), Supplement (SI) and total (TI) intake (g DM/kg LW.day), Liveweight gain (LWG; kg/day), hip height gain (HHG; mm/100 days), hip width gain (HWG, mm/100 days) and body condition score (BCS) of early (EW) and normally (NW) weaned1 crossbred Brahman heifers fed different levels of post-weaning supplementation2 over the first dry season3,4.
Table 3.
The concentration of calcium (Ca; mmol/L), phosphorus (P; mmol/L), total protein (mg/L), plasma urea-N (PUN; mmol/L), non-esterified fatty-acids (NEFA; mEq/L), insulin (IU/mL), insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1; ng/mL), triiodothyronine (T3; nmol/L), leptin (ng/mL), bone-specific alkaline phosphatase (BAP; U/L) and C-terminal telopeptides of type I collagen (CTX-1; ng/mL) in the plasma of early (EW) and normally (NW) weaned crossbred Brahman heifers fed two different supplement treatments1 during the first dry season2,3.
Table 4.
Height of proliferative (PZ; μm) and hypertrophic zone (HZ; μm), number of hypertrophic chondrocytes (n of HC) per column (n/column), diameter terminal hypertrophic chondrocytes (THC; μm), bone volume (Bv/Tv; %), trabecular separation (Tb.Th; μm), trabecular thickness (Th.Sp; μm) and bone surface area (BS; mm2) of early (EW) and normally (NW) weaned crossbred Brahman heifers fed two different supplement treatments1 during the first dry season2,3.
Table 5.
Puberty and pregnancy percentage of early (EW) and normally (NW) weaned Brahman crossbred heifers fed different post-weaning supplementation treatments during the first dry season1,2,3.
Fig 2.
Effect of pre-mating liveweight (LW) on the likelihood of pregnancy, expressed as a percentage, (A) and kernel density estimation plots of pre-mating LW (B) and pre-mating hip height (HH; C) of non-pregnant and pregnant crossbred Brahman heifers. Weaning weight group and its interaction with pre-mating LW was initially included in the model describing the effect of pre-mating LW on pregnancy percentage and since it was not significant (P = 0.71 and P = 0.90 respectively) a single model was created using data from early and normally weaned heifers. The model represented in A is described by Eqs 1 and 2 and grey shaded area represents the 95% confidence interval around the fit. Pre-mating LW and HH were recorded on 30-Oct-2015 and natural mating occurred between 05-Jan-2016 to 25-May-2016.