Look to cows and agriculture / silviculture. Animal husbandry is leaps and bounds ahead of cannabis
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I’ll get there one day, but that’s beyond my capacity for the foreseeable future.
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Here is what I was responding to:
‘I don’t think that males that display “female” traits are desirable i.e. trichome coverage.’
Skunk Mag:
Leaf hairs and trichomes are basically the same things. So, for superior resin production (and terpenes ) in your offspring, you want your males to have the genetic potential to donate those properties; denser trichome formation means increased resin production.
Kalifa:
Some males are covered in trichomes, just like female plants. Not all good male studs produce lots of trichomes but that is always a good sign.
Not trying to argue here because I am certainly no breeding “expert”. But we do pick female traits in males to pass on to females. Cluster formation for one is a good example. I see no logical reason why potency in a male would also not be passed to it’s progeny. Is it not the same concept as both parents having blue eyes increasing the chance of the children to inherit that trait?
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Well that’s just silly. These kids nowadays want us to believe the espousing different opinions means we’re opponents, and there’s no way we can both be correct. One of us must go! 
But for real — there’s nothing wrong with an impassioned argument; but there is something seriously wrong with people being so invested in a belief that they hold a grudge against anyone who disagrees.
But back on topic — what I’m saying is I believe specific combining ability is more important than which traits the male displays. The last Kashmir male I chose is a good example of a beautiful plant with a lackluster breeding potential. He looked the part, but his kids on average just weren’t what they could have been. He was a little too dominant.
Some males are ugly, but make good breeders because all of the visible traits fall into the background, and the moms traits get amplified.
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That makes sense to me, I’ve got friends who are smart, fit and attractive whose kids are literally none of those.
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I totally agree with your points in this post.
Impassioned discussion is a great way to learn.
Grow on brother……….
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I don’t think the “blue eyes” analogy is very apt.
It’s more like assuming a human male with female traits like wide hips, lack of body hair, and gynecomastia aka breasts is somehow going to produce more attractive, stronger daughters.
IMO you’d want a strong, tall, vigorous male that has attractive sisters.
I’d postulate choosing males with female characteristics makes the resulting plants more likely to be intersex.
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The question, I think, is whether those “female characteristics” are in fact female characteristics, or if they’re just characteristics that we value in the females but typically ignore in the males because… well, we typically just kill the males unless we want to breed. Then we’re surprised that we don’t know what characteristics are good in a male. 
Is there actually any research that’s been done on whether these are sex-linked genes?
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my Grand Daddy Purple Male was a runt and was one of those that many people would immediately do away with but in the end he turned into one of the best males I have had. His crosses have been great looking at them a few years later 
.
I’m still kicking myself for letting him go but who can wait around for a few years to see if they like a male or not - I truly wish I could !!
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A male will never produce the amount of Cannabinoids or resins that a female will. General thinking is the UV blocking resins are there in the first place to protect the seeds. And males don’t produce seeds.
That anecdotal evidence alone at the very least suggests it is a sex linked trait. But no, I haven’t done any genetic testing. A male will be judged by the females it produces in its progeny and nothing else.
“X” doesn’t always mean “Y” and obviously we’re all amateurs at best, but I’d love to see some data on the subject. I’m sure in a few years we’ll know. I might be 100% wrong or partially wrong or partially right or 100% right. I might be wrong for right reasons or right for wrong reasons. But in my limited experience, female associated traits don’t mean much in males. Both pollinations I’ve done, males had zero visible capitate trichomes and the results were good. I’m about to do a third, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for “female traits”.
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Well here you go:
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Can you genuinely make sense of any of that? I had a hard time even following the abstract.
The actual paper is way over my head. I am not a geneticist, and I don’t think anyone on this board is. In fact, it seems more like a methodology of analysis than “this specific trait is sex-linked” and doesn’t seem to make any sort of inferences as to “males with female traits breeding better”.
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That’s way way way over my head
Greetings @EugeneDebs420,
I dunno about all that fancy stuff these folks are talkin, but here’s a good beginner’s book on breeding.
“The Cannabis Breeder’s Bible” by Greg Green
It’s available free as a PDF at this link:
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Who’s Greg Green and what varieties has he bred? Stuff I can look at and say “yeah this guy knows what he’s talking about”?
There’s a lot of hucksters and “experts” out there. People love the Jason King books but they’re FULL of misinformation. Same with Jorge Cervantes, same with Ed Rosenthal. Same with every High Times article. I am very mistrustful of self-anointed “experts” in this field.
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It was a little over my head as well, not surprisingly… the takeaway, I suspect, is that they could only confirm 565 sex-linked genes out of ~30k. Of course, that might be meaningless considering that they couldn’t identify any segregation criteria for a bit over 16k genes, in which case the takeaway is… nothing? Or perhaps it’s also significant that they came up with a 70% degeneration rate on the Y chromosome, through methods that I find rather opaque because TL;DR. I guess that means very little is passed on from the male in the first place… which somewhat fits with comments that I’ve heard from breeders that the best males pass on only a few traits, but support the females well with those traits. @JohnnyPotseed has also commented that he notices females pass on their traits much more than males do in crosses; though his notes are probably not quite as impeccable as this paper, it’s a notable correlation with ~70 years of empirical evidence.
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Being an ‘expert’ is something I’ve never laid claim to cuz. Like you, I find a lot of BS in a lot of the supposed ‘experts’ works.
@Cormoran used me as an example, and was accurate in saying my notes probably aren’t as complete as any actual research into this.
I merely state what I’ve found to be a general truth in the decades of crossing strains. It’s my personal observations and nothing more. Mentioned more in passing than anything else.
In all of the crosses I’ve done (hundreds!) I have never once seen the pollen donor/male traits show up more than the female/pollinated plant!
Subtle differences, yes… but never seen a plant display more of the male strain than the mother strain.
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One of my Bodhi SM males I use for some projects, just smells awesome standing next to it, let alone a stem rub. Many things go into picking that perfect one.
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Talked to my friend who’s finishing up a degree in bio… apparently this doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. I thought it meant that males didn’t pass on their traits as well as females. It has nothing to do with that, it means that 70% of the Y chromosome is non-recombinant and therefore can’t recombine and cross over to another strand of DNA. Basically, a low chance of mutations occurring in the Y chromosome.
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