Ok, I’ve been growing for a decade, I’ve grown roughly 300 plants, and grown males to make seeds multiple times. I’ve never actually seen this before, though I have read about it.
Grapey walter auto cbg male dropped its flowers and started producing pistils. He showed male and I pulled him from my flower tent, into my veg cabinet so he wouldn’t pollinate anything accidently. That was about 10days ago. The male flowers that opened did not drop anypollen either.
I’m just posting this in its own thread so people can see this oddity if they don’t read my grows.
There’s all kinds of things that a male with pistils can mean. It’s no surprise that pistils are sometimes coincident with lack of pollen. As a female can be made to produce pollen with CS/STS spray, it happens when hormones are suppressed in the plant (ethylene). So if you find a male that has pistils, it is likely a heterogametic sex (XY) genetically, but for some reason has a defect that produces more hormone that is causing the pollen not to happen. But it is perhaps hard to distinguish from a homogametic plant (XX) that has defect that would cause ethylene suppression. So it is my belief that it can be either case, and you need to know more before you make a determination.
Sometimes males that have this trait can produce plants that are very strongly female, possibly because of overactive female hormone production. So in some cases, the homogametic (XX) progeny can often show no intersex traits at all, not even a single nanner.
But I think it is also more complicated than that. I have also seen lines with females that produce male flowers. The same males from that line will often also toss pistils.
So if you grow males and females and the females are normal, then I think there is a good chance that the males in the line are not hermaphrodites, but rather are expressing a female phenotype due to hormones. But if the females show male flowers and the males show pistils, then it is likely the males will pass on that trait to its progeny.
This is the theory I’m currently under. Also, good timing, because I have a sterile male that I was about to kill for the same reason. BUT, now I’m considering experimenting hitting the sterile male with STS to block ethylene and produce pollen.
Awesome. This is the kind of answer that makes me love OG.
I have a single female going that I will check very closely tonight to see if it has any male flowers.
Would changing the light cycle on an auto make it act funny? It went from 18/6 for its first 2 weeks to 12/12 for about 10 days when it looked like flowers were about to open, then back to 18/6 until now. Its 39 days old. I just counted.
In truth, I don’t have that much experience with autos, so I don’t want to overstate my knowledge of them. But the male I have now is an auto and is also producing pistils. I have only gone from 18/6 to 14/10 and it is happening with mine as well.
I don’t think it should matter, but I lack enough experience with autos to make any claims.
Same here. I’m only growing them to try the cbg. If it helps me, then I’ll always grow a few of these hempy style. Its so amazingly easy. I love it. It makes hydro work for someone like me who could never get it to work.
Solid information right there! If we were into testing, that would certainly be a qualified subject plant. I could only imagine breeding for fem seeds without reversing a fem.
I don’t think in this case you would get fem seeds. I’m saying that the females that you do get may be less likely to produce any intersex traits – like they wouldn’t produce nanners in response to stress as easily. Also they might actually be more difficult to reverse if you wanted to produce fem seeds.
Take it with a grain of salt though. This is just strictly based on my observations, and some reading in hemp studies.
There is something in its genetic makeup that is changing the ethylene homeostasis as it begins to mature in flowering. As @lefthandseeds has pointed out anything can happen at this point but the real question is do you want to invest the time in a plant that has interest hormonal imbalance?
This is a trait that can be somewhat common in pure thai cultivars. Maybe try reaching out to John Fowler and seeing how he worked his Thai strains. I believe he outcrossed most with a Acapulco Gold cross to stabilize them.
@lefthandseeds, spraying your male with STS probably won’t get your sterile male to produce pollen but I would sit back and watch your experiments unfold.
I think I’d still be somewhat surprised if it worked, but I haven’t heard of it being tried before. I’m at least curious to know how much of this expression is strictly mediated by plant hormones.
Literature often talks about the expressed sex as a phenotype. Certainly if my plant is heterogametic, then I’m not clear on how else to describe it other than as being a hormonal response. So I’ll give it a try and we’ll see what happens.
I have some pictures of males with pistils, it only happens in some branches. I’ve seen it at 88g13hp, also at haward’s Apollo F2, it happened when I put them in bloom for a few weeks, then I returned them to 24 hours of light
