HEREDITY OF THE NON-BEARING TRAIT OF THE VEGETATIVE 'SNAKY' STEM IN PINEAPPLE

The long non-bearing creeping snake-like (‘snaky’) vegetative stems of ‘Maspine’ pineapple have considerable capacity to generate numerous plantlets and, therefore, are often used as a source of new planting materials. The inconsistency in yields of ‘Maspine’ derived from mass production materials, especially those that used stems of ‘snaky’ plants as starting materials, prompted genetic study on the non-bearing nature of these pineapple stems. Variances for percentage of fruit bearing, yield per plot and fruit number per plot indicated there were real differences in the performance of the tested populations. These populations appeared to segregate according to their sources of the starting materials. When ranked in terms of fruiting percentage, the populations showed decreasing trend according to their respective starting materials: crowns (90%) > suckers of the normal plants (88%) > suckers from ‘snaky’ plants (33 to 37%). Poor fruiting percentage of populations derived from ‘snaky’ plants persisted over two consecutive generations, indicating that the non-bearing trait is an inherited character. The high heritability of fruiting percentage (H_b²=0.83) and number of fruit harvested/plot (H_b²=0.73) indicates the two traits are closely associated with fruit bearing and supports the contention that the low fruiting percentage of ‘snaky’ stems is an inherited character. We conclude that ‘snaky’ stems are not a recommended source of material to be used in rapid multiplication of ‘Maspine’ pineapple.