Morphological evaluation of cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.) Genetic materials in San Vicente de Chucurí, Santander

Abstract

The objective of this work was to characterize morphologically three cocoa clones in the municipality of San Vicente de Chucuri, Colombia. Field trials were established for the study of morphological variables under a completely randomized design with three replications; the number of experimental samples used was nine plants per farm. Eight phenotypic variables were considered for field data collection.  The variables were evaluated with the one-way analysis of variance model (ANOVA) and the comparison of means was performed by Tukey's honest significant difference test (Tukey DSH). The results indicated significant (P≤0.05) or highly significant (P≤ 0.01) differences to the response between genotypes for all variables except for fruit width, fruit ratio, seed ratio. The significant difference (P≤ 0.05) found between genotypes were; fruit length, seed weight, number of seeds per ear. The highly significant variables were leaf length, leaf width, leaf length to width ratio (RH), seed length, seed width. For the quantitative variables, the FSV-41 material exhibited higher mean values than the clones FEC-2 and CCN-51 for the variables leaf width, seed length and seed width, allowing the determination of the outstanding characteristics to facilitate the recommendation of the use of these materials for this zone. For leaf length, genotype FEC-2 presented a superior average. The CCN-51 genotype did not show superiority for the leaf length variables with respect to the two clones evaluated, FEC-2 and CCN-51.