Estimulación en plántulas de banano (musa × paradisiaca) clon grand nain con diferentes dosis de algas marinas líquidas aplicadas foliarmente.

Abstract

Agriculture is an extremely important pillar in the economic and social development, the specific production of banana crop represents most of the economic income of families in the province of El Oro, therefore, it is essential to establish and define techniques to obtain better yields, which is achieved through optimal and timely development of the plant, however, there is a problem focused on the early stimulation of new plantations or in template state, many producers by ignorance ignore the conditions that can cause stress in banana plants and limit their vegetative development. Due to the aforementioned background, the present research was carried out with the evaluation of different doses of biostimulants of liquid seaweed extracts in the banana farm "La Envidia" located in Palestina, belonging to the parish of La Iberia, canton El Guabo, province of El Oro, Ecuador, with the purpose of determining the effect of foliar application of liquid seaweed extract Ascophyllum nodosum (L), through the evaluation of growth and vegetative development variables, to improve early stimulation in a banana plant "Musa x paradisiaca", clone Grand Nain. The study was conducted with 1 control and 3 treatments with doses of 7 cc, 15 cc and 30 cc of the liquid seaweed extract product Forcral, an experimental design in completely randomized blocks (DBCA) was used, consisting of three blocks with four treatments each, reaching a total of 12 experimental units each composed of 6 banana plants clone Grand Nain, established with a planting frame of 1 meter by 1 meter. The vegetative variables evaluated were plant height, number of leaves, leaf area, pseudostem stem, number and length of roots, and the mass variables were fresh and dry weight of leaves, pseudostem and roots; the data were collected weekly over a total period of 70 days, the weights were obtained in the Soil Laboratory of the Technical University of Machala by means of the drying oven and weighing scales. The statistical analysis was carried out with IBM SPSS Statistics software, in which, to ensure the representativeness of the sample, outliers were detected and eliminated through an exploratory analysis of data by means of box plots and biases, and then the assumptions of normality and homoscedasticity were validated by means of the Shapiro Wilk normality test and Levene's test, respectively. The existence of significant differences between the study treatments was determined by means of a univariate analysis of variance for each dependent variable, followed by the classification of homogeneous groups by means of post hoc tukey tests at 5% with a significance level of 95%. Finally, a Pearson correlation analysis was performed to determine those variables that directly and inversely affect the development of another response variable. The results showed that the dose with the best efficiency in the early stimulation of banana plants in the seedling stage was 30 cc of the product Forcral, which presented the best results in all the study variables with the exception of the number of leaves, since it did not present significant statistical differences. With the implementation of seaweed extracts in the nutritional plan, it is possible to obtain plants with great vegetative vigor since it increased the leaf area (1.47 m2), the number of roots (108) and the stem (46 cm), which are the main variables responsible for good vegetative development. The storage and availability of water in vegetative parts such as leaves, roots and pseudostems increased, reaching values of 1305 g, 431 g, 2882 g of moisture weight. Finally, the number of roots obtained the highest correlation with all the study variables, mainly because the seaweed extract contains phytohormones precursors of plant growth and organic matter that stimulate root development, and these in turn absorb more nutrients from the soil allowing optimal growth and vegetative development, in addition to increasing the plant's defenses by increasing its vigor.