I’m not sure, I think that was just a finicky plant. They like to act out for attention sometimes. lmfao.
There’s only two symptoms that I know for a fact about this. If we look back at the example lampchoppd showed us, that little spot of damaged cuticle is the first thing I noticed with this virus, way back, and I thought it was damage from an IPM spray that wasn’t dilute enough.
That leaf that upstate posted bugs me out, tho, because it looks just like a variegation you would see in a store. There’s absolutely no damage or distortion in that leaf! If they all looked like that I would never have guessed there was a problem. Other than those two symptoms, I haven’t seen any change in any plants to pick them out of a lineup.
And to be fair, there are lots of pathogens that can live in a host but can’t survive off of that organism. If you’ve ever watched “monsters inside me” those are the worms that end up inside your eyes or brain, because they’re not meant to be inside humans, and they’re searching for something they can digest. Or an ichneumon wasp, who lays eggs inside a tree, but which doesn’t actually parasitize the tree.
So I may very well be making much to do about no thing, but now that I seen it on the chocolate rain, it does indeed jump between plants. The question still up in the air is just whether it’s deleterious to cannabis.
Even the variegation you see in a store is caused by some break in a chromosome if I remember correctly. That’s why they spontaneously revert to normal growth if you let em. It’s only in cannabis that we don’t talk about viruses — in the rest of the plant world they’re ubiquitous.
My fucking problem is the cannabis growers who know these problems exist and don’t speak about them. They’re the same type of people who complain about “cancel culture” as if consequences for your actions are a new thing. I know exactly where this virus came from, I can point to other members who have the exact same symptoms from the exact same lines, from the exact same source;
But pointing fingers doesn’t help us.
It’s not just the behavior of that one person who got us here; it’s the fear they had of being stigmatized. I understand that’s the natural response — but fuck that scaredy cat shit. It’s been a couple days now since I seen it jump to the chocolate rain, and it’s been eating at me ever since. I can’t imagine lying to you all, pretending that I think it’s just a nutrient deficiency, or a quirk in the genetics, in the hopes of never being found out.
So since the affected plants aren’t really stressing, I am not really freaking out. Like I said, pathogens are everywhere in the rest of the gardening community, it’s been naive of cannabis growers to think we’re special. It’s just another thing we need to be vigilant against, and another reason to keep a tight IPM.
