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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2017
Silkworm is an important industrial insect with many unique characters. Many reports showed that many traits in silkworm have heterotic effects (Rajanna and Puttaraju, 1998). Newly evolved silkworm lines and hybrids need to estimate these effects (Kumar et al. 1994). The use of selection for genetic and economic improvement of traits in the shortest time will have the highest improvement. To date, selection of parental generations for silkworm egg production in next generation, based on phenotypic characterizations without individual records. Although reproduction and production traits record individually has expensive costs, however it expected selection based on individual records can improve offspring performance, especially if these economical traits have relatively high heritability. There are three Chinese pure and commercial lines at Iran. Since these lines have different phenotypic and genotypic characterizations, thus their response to individual selection system can be different. Therefore, in this experiment the effect of selection on reproductive characters on Chinese lines during three years was investigated.