Separation of Male and Female Silkworm Pupae by Weight

Prediction of Separability

Abstract

The weight separation of male and female silkworm pupae has been out of use because of increaed overlaps in their weight distributions. This has been brought about by recent labour-savings in silkworm rearing such as “joso” rearing. However, the weight separation was reconsidered in this study with possible application of recent advanced technology in weight measurements in order to mechanize the operation of the separation which is now entirely dependent on visual judgement.
The main objective of this study was to predict the separability of the male and the female in weight because the prediction of the separability should be required for the effective operation in mechanization.
The prediction could be possible by the regression line with the mean and the standard deviation of weight of sampled male and female cocoons (Fig. 2).
Weight distributions of the two hundred sampled male and female cocoons were nearly represented by normal distributions. The separation at the upper 1 percent point of the male and lower 1 percent point of the female in normal distributions also showed similar figures in the separability to the regression line method above (Tab. 3 and Fig. 5).