Occurrence of Two Races of Black Pepper in Southern Region of India

Out of a 192 accessions of black pepper, 103 including 48 named clones, 12 wild clones and 43 unnamed clones from Western Ghats region were observed for 12 quantitative and 7 qualitative passport and spike and berry characters. The collection based on two very important qualitative characters such as berry shape and pace of ripening colour change, which are closely associated with each other along with distribution pattern could be divided into two races (race 1 with 7 accessions and race 2 with 96 accessions). These races are named as race ‘Kariyilanchi’ and ‘Karimunda’ respectively after the local varietal names of two prominent accessions each representing a race. Numerical taxonomic study based on the above characters could substantiate the racial classitication with 6 accessions of the first race falling under a single group in the dendrogram. One chemical parameter, oleoresin content is lesser (30.03%) in race 1 as compared to 41.36% in race 2.