Identifying gender from seed thread

[highminwin]

this is actually a really good idea. rather than us slowly and painstakingly working through a dozen seeds at a time, some organization or institute could photograph, sprout and catalog the thousands of seeds necessary to get a good sample size and then, as you said, apply ai or machine learning. this could be channeled through a phone app where you take pictures of your seed and it would give you an estimate on whether it’s likely to be male/female.

well until that happens, we’re over here in our corner trying to take good photos of these little seeds and keep the learning and experimenting going on as best we can. speaking of which, here’s my next batch of seeds. anyone’s more than welcome to chime in on which seeds they think might be female and i’ll take that into account when figuring out which seeds to pop. my plan is to pop two of each. thanks for keeping an open mind!

[Foreigner]

I predict: all female except that one ugly one.

[Jango]

My Jack Herer beans look like yours with hardly any volcano at all, be interesting to see what develops.

[Rhai88]

this will be awesome with the BamBam f2s one theyre done… imma try this theory out… I’ll have some seeds with your name on them soon @AzSeaindooin420 not exactly lab science but it’ll be fun.

[bunny]

So I have all males?

[Jango]

Not according to the law of averages😉

[highminwin]

well, i finally got my third batch of seeds started a lot later than i expected. but i hadn’t anticipated keeping the plants from my second batch which i ended up keeping (the nanan bouclous and queen mother), as well as the flowering females from my first batch just taking a lot longer than i anticipated to finish up. i just didn’t have any more space available.

but i finished collecting pollen from my nanan bouclou 1 male last week, which finally freed up some space. so on 8/20 i thought it was about time i germinated my next batch of seeds.

i decided to add a few seeds to help selecting for possible female seeds, since some of the line-up i wasn’t totally loving. here’s a review of the seeds (old and new). i only had one extra seed of the esb and satori, whereas the others i added two more seeds for possible selection.

in the end, these were my final selections… (again according to what i know, we’re looking for roundness of the volcano/dimple shape, which should hopefully indicate a female seed).

• jack herer 1 and 6
• putang x thunder fuck mountain 1 and 5
• esb 2 and 5
• satori 1 and 3
• magic medicine 2 and 5

two days later and we have tails showing on both the jack herers and satoris, with the jack herer looking like it was first of the whole batch to pop. the jh seeds are from @AzSeaindooin420, so good work on producing some healthy and active seeds!

seedlings are going into happy frog soil, but this time when transplanting the seedlings, rather than back-filling the hole with more happy frog soil, i’ve decided to use down to earth’s starter mix instead. i hope to avoid the issue i had before where i lost two or three seedlings that weren’t able to get their head above soil due to being stuck beneath some large-ish chunks of debris in the happy frog soil. although i hope the straight-up starter mix isn’t going to be too hot for the seedlings.

here are the satori seeds.

i imagine the other seeds will pop in the next day or so. unless anything dramatic happens before then, i’ll be back in 4-6 weeks with an update once the seeds have been sexed out.

[LonelyOC]

What you should do is to pop the “male” seeds and see If you get all males… It would provide even more evidence to this claim.

Pz

[SmackyMcSmackers]

But the thing is the claim is only based on finding a larger percentage of females by selecting specific seeds. It doesn’t say there are no females in the seeds that don’t have perfectly round volcano dimples…just that the percentage of “imperfect dimple” seeds that are female is likely to be lower.

This is one of those claims where disproving the opposing side (i.e., “imperfect dimple seeds are always males”) doesn’t really have any correlation or inference on the claim itself (i.e., “perfect dimple seeds are always females”). The only way to really disprove the claim is by obtaining a significantly large percentage of males in the “perfect dimple” seeds.

[Cormoran]

@SmackyMcSmackers

The only way to really disprove the claim is by obtaining a significantly large percentage of males in the “perfect dimple” seeds.

Actually, it’s impossible to disprove (and even more impossible to prove) the claim because any time you get a male, you can just decide after the fact that it wasn’t a perfect dimple after all. What is a perfect dimple? Whatever the viewer decides it is at the time, until someone actually defines the parameters of this experiment.

[highminwin]

that totally makes sense, but i suppose for me, ultimately if these few hours of looking over the shape of dimples gets me a higher percentage of females overall, i would happy enough with that. i don’t necessarily need to prove or disprove that only/all perfectly round dimples will be females. it’s exactly what @SmackyMcSmackers is saying… we’re banking on the hypothesis that round dimples will net us more females.

the photos i take are not the greatest (i certainly wouldn’t be happy to submit them as part of any scientific or peer-reviewed document), i’m not exact with my measurements and documentation, and the final selections i make are based partly on feeling. also, my sample size is ridiculously tiny.

but again, if i can nudge my probability of females a fair bit by doing a little work before hand, that can save me from having to cull individuals later on which would’ve been lost time and effort.

it’s funny to think about how fem seeds could just make this a totally moot point. but i suppose there might be other issues with fem seeds.

[CanuckistanPete]

I think it’s great you’re taking this on…who cares if it ends up proving anything or not? Doesn’t hurt to try and see if it does in fact hold any truth to it. I say good on ya Azseaindooin420 and highminwin!

[LonelyOC]

It does… Because i never get 50\50 female males. I always get more females then males! So If you can get 6/7 males. This have more merit to it If you can get over 50% males…

Pz

[SmackyMcSmackers]

Totally agree. In order to prove/disprove, it would definitely need to have a carefully laid out method for performing the analysis, which at minimum would require very high definition photography and precision measurements of dimples, such that it’s able to prove each dimple is perfectly round or not by using mathematical definition of a circle. “Winging it” by only relatively cursory visual inspection and “feeling” isn’t nearly sufficient to have any sort of legitimacy beyond confirmation bias.

Without scientific proof obtained from a carefully prepared & meticulously executed long term experiment covering hundreds of thousands of seeds from a variety of different sources, this whole hypothesis is merely speculation.

[Kabuddha]

I’m not knocking the thread as I have been following along and am interested especially since your results would indicate that you can tell the sex based on the morphology of the seed. But if one grows from clones (take clones from new plants for flower) you don’t really need to sex them before flower, plus you won’t loose your plants do to…whatever.
Anyway great thread, will still be here following along – eagerly anticipating positive results.

[highminwin]

sup overgrow! it’s been awhile but i’m back with, unfortunately, sad news.

it seems like my beginner’s luck has finally started to wear thin, as i have had a 100% failure rate with all of the seeds from this third grow. i had four seeds sprout tails a few weeks back (the jack herer’s from AzSeainDooin420, and the satoris from mandala). i then put them in cups and back-filled the holes with down-to-earth’s starter mix. i thought this would be a good idea, since i’d had a few seedlings die in the soil from the chunky happy frog soil (even though i really like the soil).

an og’er had mentioned having success back-filling with vermiculite, which i thought was very clever. i didn’t have any vermiculite and didn’t want to buy any, so i thought the straight up starter mix would be a great substitute. apparently it wasn’t! maybe it was too hot, maybe it was too damp or thick/sludgy for the seeds to work their way through. but whatever the case, none of my seedlings popped out of the soil.

i suppose that would have been fine since i had more seeds germinating in ziplock bags.

i even put in some seeds which had been unfortunately cracked in transit when shipped to me. i wasn’t expecting much luck with those since they had already been sitting for a month in their cracked state. i really should have been more proactive about those seeds when i first got them, but i was just busy with life at the time and the thought didn’t occur to me until i was germinating my third set of seeds. but i thought what the hell, why not? better than just throwing them out.

except none of those seeds made it either. i’m a little baffled, but my guess is that it was just too hot. it’s been summer time and temps have been high. i also had the seeds on a heating pad, since it had been helpful before. i wasn’t diligently tracking the temps on the pad, but it was definitely in the low 90’s, possibly the mid or even upper 90’s… i’m not sure as i’m at work during the days when it’s probably hottest, and i did keep the heat pad on all day (at it’s lower/lowest setting).

i removed the seeds from their bags about two-ish weeks ago and have had them in solo cups of soil since, but still no action.

so i was planning on waiting a week or two for temps to die down, and then maybe pop just three or four seeds to grow a few plants to send out to friends. but mostly i was just planning on riding out the last of my first grow, finish my second grow, and then clean, prep and wait for my doc d seed run in the winter.

sorry for the null results, we’ll have to revisit in a little while.

[CanuckistanPete]

That sucks bro…chin up…next time you’ll nail it down.

[PhilCuisine]

@PhilCuisine

but I think I’m gonna do my own experiment this fall for my indoor grow…throughout the years of my growing I have done quite a few experiments myself just to prove or bust a myth that the growing community says it’s not true…

Had to quote myself folks…I actually went the other route, I picked 8 male seeds to sprout and all were males but 1…I needed pollens for future breedings and it was my intention to just grow males…the picture below are all the males…MTP & DK13 strains.

[MoBilly]

That’s more than a little interesting.

[Qtip]

@highminwin

sorry for the null results

These seeds weren’t willing to give up their secrets!