Hi
I was wondering whether it is possible to use variation in BLUPs as a measure of phenotypic diversity within a population (see example below)? I have been reading about their use and misuse in predicting breeding values from animal models or as  estimates of natural selection (e.g. Hadfield etal 2010). However, if I'm not as interested in attributing a source to phenotypic variation (genetic vs environmental) as I am in documenting it per se, would BLUPs be ok?

Example
Imagine a dataset comprised of repeated measures of annual growth within a number of individuals collected from a population. Growth in a given year is related to intrinsic effects (age, fish to fish variation) and extrinsic effects (e.g. temperature).

M1<- lmer(growth ~ age + temperature + (1|fish) + (1|year),data)

Could I use the variation of fish random effects as a measure of growth phenotypic diversity? If so, could someone suggest a reference that has used a similar approach?

Cheers

John

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