Look up the minimum breeding age (years) for one or more species and sexes

Maps each supplied (species, sex) pair to the minimum age in years at which an animal of that species and sex can produce offspring, using the speciesGestation lookup table (or a supplied breedingTable). Matching is case- and whitespace-insensitive on both species and sex. Any species that is missing, NA, an empty string, or not present in the table – and any sex that is not "M" or "F" – falls back to default (2 years, the legacy package-wide minimum parent age). Used by the Genetic Value Analysis unknown-parent mean-kinship correction to form a focal animal's contemporaneous breeding-age peer cohort. The bundled table is populated for the common colony NHP species; the user-configurable override path is a separate feature.

Usage

getSpeciesMinBreedingAge(species, sex, breedingTable = NULL, default = 2)

Arguments

species: character vector of species names (may contain NA).
sex: character vector of sexes ("M" or "F"); recycled to the length of species (or vice versa).
breedingTable: optional data.frame with a character column species and numeric columns minMaleBreedingAge and minFemaleBreedingAge to use instead of the bundled speciesGestation table. Defaults to NULL, which uses the bundled table.
default: numeric fallback returned for species that are missing, NA, empty, or not found, and for a sex that is not "M"/"F". Defaults to 2.

Value

a numeric vector of minimum breeding ages in years, the same length as the longer of species and sex.

Examples

getSpeciesMinBreedingAge("RHESUS", "M")
#> [1] 4
getSpeciesMinBreedingAge("RHESUS", "F")
#> [1] 2.5
getSpeciesMinBreedingAge(c("RHESUS", "UNICORN"), c("M", "F"))
#> [1] 4 2