Fem seeds and there impact on the future of the species known as cannabis.

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what you see isn't always what you have though IMO. The enviroment CANNOT change the sex its predetermined in the genes, expression is another thing entirely.
 
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I think you guys will find that your m/f ratios are not statistically significant.

If you are only popping a pack at a time you're not really going to be able to say much.

And I've heard the old saying about deeper cups and temps effecting things but I believe it's just an old wive's tale.
 
I think you guys will find that your m/f ratios are not statistically significant.

If you are only popping a pack at a time you're not really going to be able to say much.

And I've heard the old saying about deeper cups and temps effecting things but I believe it's just an old wive's tale.

Lol.....Mate if I cant give you a proper statistic after 35yrs of growing and thousands of plants then I have achieved nothing.

I must admit mate you are good for a laugh with your Know all, but done nothing attitude....keep it up it is enjoyable:D

Pack at a time.....lol
 
Lol.....Mate if I cant give you a proper statistic after 35yrs of growing and thousands of plants then I have achieved nothing.

I must admit mate you are good for a laugh with your Know all, but done nothing attitude....keep it up it is enjoyable:D

Pack at a time.....lol

There are two schools - the guys who have had dirt on their hands for ages and have accumulated a wealth of experience along the way and those who are young, have read a few books, done a bit of growing and think they are now authoritative voices.

Sorry lads, all the books in the world won't give you more than a small fraction of the knowledge that people like Nevil, Kangativa, Shantibaba and others have accumulated the hard way.

That's the bottom line, theory means f^&* all when measured again experience.

So while I find it occasionally mildly interesting to listen to theories someone read in a book, I always find it very enlightening and valuable to hear what the highly experienced have seen and done.

On the feminised thing, to me it's like autoflowering, it may have a very small niche where it can be useful, but for the majority, it doesn't offer anything really worthwhile, I mean, how hard is it to pull your males? There is a vast body of evidence that regular male-female matings produce great plants, just look at the work of Nev and Shanti, all the evidence you need is right there. Therefore I don't see any need for feminising, I'm happy with what I already got (regular seeds) so why mess with something new and unproven (feminised seeds)?

There's an old saying that happens to also be a truism: 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'.

Spain is now full of seeded inferior weed due to the get-rich-quick hacks who have taken cuttings of other people's work (much of it Nev and Shanti's) and made femmed beans just to turn an easy profit, I've smoked femmed rip-offs of SSH, Critical Mass, Widow, Rhino and others, they were all pale shadows of the original, I've grown femmed seeds from half a dozen companies and with one notable exception, never found a keeper, I have found lots of plants that lacked vigour and yield and quite a few intersexed plants.

I'm not against feminising per se, but I am against the way the technique is being used to steal other people's work to turn easy profits, just look how many new seed companies have appeared recently, all selling feminised seeds and most of them offering the same genes, almost nothing fresh and new is being introduced and the motivation to bring something new to the table just isn't there when it's so much easier and quicker to take a cutting of someone else's work and rape it for a quick buck.
 
hay indi:),,,nice post man,,,its good to chat to you in on this fourm:),,,

yeh man i agree with you,,but imo we need forsight:),,,,i see some funny things happening,,,"loss of genetic vaieation" for an example,,imo bad things happen to people who dont think ahead,,,im just looking for forsight bro,,im just lookin for the opertunitys to avoid the pitfalls,,id say keep an eye out, something might be coming up:)


has anyone ever comented on this?,,,,,

http://dutch-passion.nl/index.php?p=feminized




In an experiment done in 1999 we grew 15 varieties of "feminized" seeds. We started with 30 seeds per variety. The goals were: 1) to determine the percentages of female, male, and hermaphroditic plants. 2) to compare the uniformity (homogeneity) among plants from "feminized" seeds with those grown from "regular" seeds.

1. The results were excellent. Nine out of fifteen varieties had 100% female offspring. Percentages of female plants from the other 6 varieties were between 80 and 90%. These plants were all hermaphrodites, producing their male flowers at the end of their lifecycle. Seed-setting hardly took place. No males were found.

2. Approximately 70% of the plants of varieties grown from "feminized" seeds were far more uniform than plants grown from "regular" seeds of the same variety. About 20% of the varieties were a little more uniform, while in 10% of the varieties no difference in uniformity was seen.

From literature and our own findings it appears that the growth of a male or female plant from seed, except for the predisposition in the gender chromosomes, also depends on various environmental factors. The environmental factors that influence gender are:

* a higher nitrogen concentration will give more females.
* a higher potassium concentration will give more males.
* a higher humidity will give more females.
* a lower temperature will give more females.
* more blue light will give more females.
* Fewer hours of light will give more females.

It is important to start these changes at the three-pairs-of-leaves stage and continue for two or three weeks, before reverting to standard conditions.

To produce our feminized seeds, we start with selected female clones. Under standard conditions these female clones do not produce any male flowers. By the method we found, we are able to have these female clones produce abundant male flowers and pollen (see photos). The pollen thus produced we use for the production of our "feminized" seeds.
 
I can vouch for the fact that seeds sprouted under 24 hours light will give you a higher percentage of females and I have most definitely done statistically significant numbers. I was hoping to shelve this one until we had sorted out if we can turn a real female into a viable male. But it has come up.

I've thought about this for years. I hinted at this before, "I can turn a real male into a female, but I can't turn a real female into a male". You can switch something off that is there, but you can switch something on that isn't there.

I believe that the expression of sexuality "Chrysalises" at germination. Maleness is switched on or off depending on the conditions the seed sprouts in. The true females will always be females. Maybe it's the sexually ambivalent group (intersex, hermie, call it what you want) that go either way depending on the conditions, but it is also conceivable that true males can switch. Thoughts anyone?
N.
 
nev im with you on this 1,,,ive seen sex ratios weirdly change due to enviroment!!,,,,il stand on a rooftop and shout it,,,but everyone laughes at me for this 1...no1 believes me,,,because that would mean admiting some inderviduals are woking on an X/autosome system and not an active Y
 
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Pop 100 seeds and show me 70 females if it happens all the time. IME you get 50-50.

I think if you pop 100 seeds you'll see that 95% of the time you get between 40 and 60 females.

I popped 40 last week, I'll show you mine if you show me yours ;) Ooops, mine will be about 65% female but that's because some of the pollen used was from reversed moms.
 
because that would mean admiting some inderviduals are woking on an X/autosome system and not an active Y
I don't think that I was suggesting that Rick. I think that the mechanism is the switching on or off of the Y. I'm not sure if it is intersex Y or all Y's.
N.
 
Hi Rick, I've seen a lot of stuff about how to get differing male-female ratios, and it's all pretty anecdotal, for instance, a friend of mine insists that using Fish Emulsion on seedlings will give more females, I've never seen anything personally other than the high temp case I mentioned earlier.

Hi Nev, I don't have any thoughts of value on that topic I'm afraid. To me, the crux of the problem is that we don't have a fully fleshed-out understanding of the mechanism behing sexual expression in cannabis.

No-one has yet been able to explain to me exactly how that mechanism works, so until we know all the ins and outs of how sexual expression works then we have some way to go to be able to move from informed specualtion to hard and fast facts when discussing this topic.

I don't know and no-one has been able to explain to me how the intersexed thing works either. Is there an actual intersex trait? Are intersexed plants the result of damaged chromosones? So many areas that need greater scientific study.

The big problem is the illegal status of cannabis, this has meant that far less work has been done in studying it's genome than has been done with species like rice, I mean, we have completely mapped the rice genome and have a complete understanding of it's genes, I wish we could say the same about cannabis.

I expect Nevil has grown more cannabis plants than anyone else, he was the main man during the brief period when it was legal to grow in Holland, and if he doesn't know all the answers then it just goes to show how much knowledge is lacking to complete the picture.

Nevil, do you still have a photo collection from your work in Holland? I would love to see pictures of your work, all we have is that 'Inside Cannabis Castle' article Steve Hager did in 1987.
 
Nevil, do you still have a photo collection from your work in Holland? I would love to see pictures of your work,
I don't have much by way of mementos from the past. My life gets burned to the ground with a certain regularity (literally and figuratively), so like the phoenix, I have to rise from the ashes (getting stoned again, very nice Oaxacan). There are always new heights to fly to.
Ed Rosenthal made a lot of photo's in the day. I can still see him, smashed out of his head, trashing plants like the grim reaper with his tripod, but I've got to say, he is a fine photographer (but you had to take a bit of collateral damage). But it was worth it and cannabis is resilient
N..
 
I don't think that I was suggesting that Rick. I think that the mechanism is the switching on or off of the Y. I'm not sure if it is intersex Y or all Y's.
N.

nev,,,im sure someone will correct me if im wrong here,,,but the sex chromozones are just 1 pair of specialy evolved autosomes,,once you start talking about XXyy,,,,the yy is part of austosome and cant be "sex-chromozones",,there can only be 2 sex-chromozones [1pair]

eg,,,XYxx would be XYsex-chromozones and xxautosome
 
And I asked him why he thought that happened, what caused it, and how many numbers he was really talking.

He never responded.

It doesn't prove anything, remember how I said I expected 65% ladies?
 
I don't have much by way of mementos from the past. My life gets burned to the ground with a certain regularity (literally and figuratively), so like the phoenix, I have to rise from the ashes (getting stoned again, very nice Oaxacan). There are always new heights to fly to.
Ed Rosenthal made a lot of photo's in the day. I can still see him, smashed out of his head, trashing plants like the grim reaper with his tripod, but I've got to say, he is a fine photographer (but you had to take a bit of collateral damage). But it was worth it and cannabis is resilient
N..

I fully understand, I have had a similar life trajectory in the last couple of years. I lost most of my seed collection, all the pics I've taken in the last couple of years and a load of other stuff earlier this year after getting bust in Holland with a few hundred plants. But I'm still here to grow another day, so as you say, onwards and upwards! Funnily, I'm smoking Oaxacan too, my first crop back home after fleeing Holland was mostly Oaxacans, although I'd rather have the aussie tropics outdoor version than the indoor stuff I have, not that it's not good indoors, but I'm sure it expresses more fully outdoors in a good climate.

I can picture ed with his gear in your rooms, gave me a chuckle, that mental image! You're right though, cannabis is resilient, my favourite Colombian Gold cutting is close to immortal, I've given plants of it some dog's abuse over the years and it's so tough it always bounces back, one reason I've kept it so long - even a hamfisted fool like me can grow it with ease!

On the male/female thing, I can think of an example of a line that produced 80% males, and this was across hundreds of plants in dozens of gardens, it was called Pacific Aire, made by a friend in Florida, he crossed a male Pacifica (Pacific G13 x Black Widow) to the Airborne G13 female cutting and handed them out far and wide, everyone got mostly males so he went back to the drawing board and remade it with a different Pacifica selection, this resulted in Pacific Aire 2 which had a normal male-female ratio.
 
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bro,,,shifts in sex ratios are synonyms with low Ne numbers,,,im sure chim will support me on this,,i could find a paper to support but im sure you will agree,,,no?
 
If you find the paper Rick, can you highlight the relevant sections. Some times I find peoples arguments hard to follow.
N.
 
il have a look now for you nev,,,im pretty confident il find it quickish:)

Chimea will probbly explain it better than myself or the paper can,,,i allways post up papers and people interperate them verrey differntly,,,but this is pretty mutch standard info within population genetics [ithink]

its about fitness,,what happens is that the fitter genes sortof "push-out" the less fit genes untill the "unfit genes" are totaly removed,,,,low effective pospulation numbers ar usaly the first trigger

im sure someone is gona jump in here and just explain it batter than i can:)

il look for the paper and hope someone will come to support me on this while im looking:)
 
bro,,,shifts in sex ratios are synonyms with low Ne numbers,,,im sure chim will support me on this,,i could find a paper to support but im sure you will agree,,,no?

You mean synonymous? Are you saying that making selections from small populations can result in different ratios of males to females in the subsequent offspring?
 
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