Anacardium humile has low capacity for fruit production, limiting the application of experimental techniques, broadly used in the analysis of seed germination. Thus, the purpose of this paper was to introduce the statistical theory of small samples to the study of the seedling emergence of this species. Cashew nuts of different individuals were randomly collected, being submitted to scarification by abrasion of the pericarp near the pedicel; scarification in the same manner followed by washing in water for 24 hours, and intact cashew nuts as control treatment. The cashew nuts (50 per treatment) were sowed at 1 cm depth, in vermiculite moistened with distilled water at field capacity. The experiment was carried out under continuous fluorescent white lamps (21.8 µmol m-2 s-1), at 25 ºC. The emergence (%) presented approximated normal distribution for all treatments and they did not differ significantly by Student t test (emergence between 70% and 76%). Seedlings emerged from scarified cashew nuts washed in water presented shorter mean emergence time (16.3 days) and consequently higher mean emergence rate (0.0613 day¹) in relation to the other treatments. The uncertainty values far from zero (I > 3.28 bits) and values of Z near zero (Z < 0.095) indicated low seedling emergence synchrony for this species. The results obtained showed that by using reduced number of cashew nuts it was possible to infer about seedling emergence process without violation of the statistical principles and assumptions.
cashew nut; emergence measurements; normal distribution; Student t test
