Hello everybody
As promised, here is the conversation about the hermaphrodite plant between Myself and Simon + Thomas from Serious seeds.
I must state here that Serious Seeds were as helpful as I could have possibly imagined and are completely willing to do everything possible to help their customers with any problem. They 100% stand confidently by their solid genetics and great care seems to go into their development.
A seed Company / Breeder we can be sure to trust, I know I now do
I hope some of you find this interesting, it is quite a large post so this is an early warning of it being quite a long Read
Hello Serious Seeds,
I am writing to you as I have recently germinated a whole 11 pack of Regular AK47 seeds to which 10 Germinated and 9 of those Female. The one remaining plant was a Triploid/Hermaphrodite which is my reason for writing to you today.I was really hoping to result in having a male as I have wanted to cross these genetics as the smoke quality is one of my all time faveroutes, this was my intention in buying the Regular seed pack but I resulted in all females and one Hermie which leaves me to believe that the entire pack was Femanised rather than Regular or possibly a little unstable ? I am a member of 420 Magazine so there are pictures to document the Hermaphrodite/Triploid as it happened If you need it for any reason. I have also encountered another member of 420 Magazine who had all Female and 1 late showing Herm so I do not know if this a common occurrence. I bought the seed pack while in Amsterdam about a year ago from \'\'ASG GIFTS SEED SUPPLIES\'\' I made sure of getting the real genetics, and kept them in refrigerated storage to preserve them until they were needed.I still have the original packaging If it is needed.
I am greatly appreciative of your assistance and eagerly await your response
HI, GreeenFingers!
Thanks for contacting us.
The other 420-member, already contacted us about his case, and I asked him to send some pics of the plant in question.
Please send us pics of the plant you are thinking is a hermaphrodite.
First of all, I want to clear up some things.
You write that one plant was a triploid/hermphrodite.
Those are two very different things!
A triploid is like a 4 leafed clover, just a freak of nature, a natural mutation.
A triploid plant is actually very good, because it developes an extra budding-site at every knot. Each third sidebranch growing out of a knot is an extra bonus given by nature.
Then you have hermaphrodites, which are plants developing both sex-organs (=male pollen-sacks and female flowers) at the same time.
This is also occurring in nature with two-sexed plant genuses like cannabis, as a survival instinct.
If no males are around in a population and autum is coming then a female plant will reverse to develope male pollen sacks and inseminate itself in order to produce seeds and survive until the next growing season.
This natural emergency program is inherent to cannabis plants and can be minimized by selecting the proper plants after stressing them.
Simon says he has stressed his strains in every way conceiveable and never had them turn hermaphrodite, therefore we are very surprised by your issues.
Please fill in the missing information (=where there is a questiomark) to answer the questions:
1) What is the name of strain you bought, and the name of the shop were you
bought the seeds?
2) About when did you buy them, the date more or less?
3) What is the (handwritten) number on the package?
4) How many seeds were in the package?
5) How many seeds did you try, and how many germinated?
6) Which germination method did you use?
7) If your problem was not about germination, please tell us in short what your problem was?
8) Send us an address where we can send new seeds to, if you qualify for a replacement.
Aloha, Thomas.
(Marketing-Manager Serious Seeds)
Hello Thomas,
Thank you for replying so quickly it is very much appreciated.
There are 3 pictures attached
I do understand the difference between Hermaphrodites and Triploids, apologies if I did not go into enough detail but what I meant by Hermaphrodite/Triploid was the fact that the plant first grew as normal throughout the first 2 weeks of the Vegetation phase as a Diploid, it was only after this point that the plant began to show its Triploid characteristics and all new nodes that developed were in Triploid form which I thought was quite strange considering that the plant had began its growth as a Diploid.
All plants were kept in the Vegetation phase until they produced pre-flowers ( this period of time was approximately 4 weeks or a little more until all plants showed ) It was at this point that I noticed every single plant had female pre-flowers which did not make sense as it was a Regular seed pack, I was almost certain that I had made a mistake so I went through all the plants again checking every single node and then I noticed that ( coincidently plant no. 3 the Triploid ) that I previously thought was female and was happy about and would have liked to use as a mother, had a few little pollen sacks on the 4th node down from the top, therefore it was a Triploid plant with both male and female sex organs, It is this whole combination that makes me think the plant was just a highly unstable genetic mutation.
I must state that at no point were the plants stressed in any way and all were in a perfectly stable environment and all of the plants grew up completely healthy otherwise.
Here is the Information you requested
1) What is the name of strain you bought, and the name of the shop were you
bought the seeds?
AK-47 regular, ASG-Gifts in Amsterdam
2) About when did you buy them, the date more or less?
about a year ago
3) What is the (handwritten) number on the package?
6728
4) How many seeds were in the package?
11
5) How many seeds did you try, and how many germinated?
11, 10
6) Which germination method did you use?
Paper towel method
7) If your problem was not about germination, please tell us in short what
your problem was?
9 female plants and one hermaphrodite
8) Send us an address where we can send new seeds to, if you qualify for a
replacement.
******************
I am greatly appreciative of your comunication and am very interested to see your opinion on this situation.
Kind regards
Hi GreeenFingers,
Thomas is not in today so I respond to your interesting email. He will be back tomorow I think so he will pick up the rest of the ‘problem’.
You have indeed a rare find I think. Normally when I see triploidy it is a plant which starts its life as such, with 3 leaves at the same node, but usually after 5 to 8 nodes it goes back to normal. After that there is nothing indicating it started its life as a triploid. In your case it started life as a normal plant and became a triploid later on, backwards to the normal situation.
What could have triggered the triploidy is the change of sex of the plant, becasue that is what seems to have happend to me. The plant was a female, but ‘decided’ to become male. Hence the female preflowers, and after some time, the male clusters. This does happen from time to time, also with female seeds. (and from the results it looks like female seeds you got in stead of regular, we dont think this is the case but this is another thing) Changing of sex is in the genome of the plant, and with regular seeds you do not notice this. But this is a known fact of cannabis plants to respond to certain stimula to change its sex. It is impossible to get this out of female seeds, and this is totally different from hermies. The only way to recognize this is when you see preflowers of a certain sex, and then when real flowering starts ( or already before as in your case) it is all of a sudden the opposite sex.
Real hermies have flowers of both sexes at the same time. Buds which carry female and male flowers intermixed, or one above the other. Sex change plants have only buds with either male or female flowers, and preflowers of the opposite sex.
I think this is what happend in your plant, and with the changing of its sex, there was also a trigger to grow triploidy. It would be interesting to see how it grows out.
Thomas will deal further with your case.
Simon
Hello Simon
Thank you for your reply, your reasoning seems to make sense but does that not usually only apply to feminised seeds rather than regulars?
I would have expected an occurrence like this from feminised seeds as I understand the process of feminising plants. Would it not be expected that something like this could not have happened where the F1 AK47 seeds were produced from stable parents rather than the feminised seeds being a grown out F1 AK47 plant that has been stressed or grown past harvest to create pollen or seeds?
This is what makes me think that my seeds were actually Feminised because of the fact that there was a Sex Change or Hermaphroditism with the fact that all 9 remaining plants were Female this seems like two reasons for me to believe that the seeds might have been a mix up.
I was just curious about your opinion on the harvest time of AK47 based on trichome development either being Clear, Cloudy Amber or combinations of each. I am reading an awful lot of differing opinions on when to harvest based on the trichomes but I was just wondering how you personally know when your AK47 has hit peak ripeness or at least the level of ripeness that you intend the plant to have based on the effect that you originally bred AK47 to produce.
I thought who better to ask than the person who created it
I greatly appreciate your communication, help and assistance and look forward to speaking to you again
Hi GreeenFingers,
Sorry for late reply. We have people sick and on holiday, and I’ve overlooked your first mail.
For my answers see below in your mail.
You mean triploidy? I have so far only seen it in plants grown from regular seeds, not in fem. plants. Although I have grown far more Regular seeds.
If you refer to hermies, then I have to say that they certainly occur in reg. plants, but one should expect a higher % in fem.plants, how much more depends on the way the fem. seeds were made.
Many unfertilized female plants will produce a few male flowers or a few bananas here and there after their peak of the flowering cycle. This tendency is part of how the sex expression of the cannabis plant works. I dont want to go into too much detail here, but I’m sure you know this is not as clear as in humans, which is almost 100% pure male or female. In cannabis its rather a gliding scale with on opposite ends the true male and females, because they do exist. Those plants have no tendency to grow flowers of the opposite sex no matter what you do to them. You could trie this out with (some) plants you have; let them flower on and on till death. Many will show some flower from the opposite sex, but some will die by themselves and will never show any banana or full male flower ( a banana is only a part of the male flower), also not under any type of stress.
It is those true male or female plants which we use for breeding. For reg, and also for fem seeds. Many seed companies do not do this but rather choose the easier plants to produce fem seeds with. But, as you’ll understand, when choosing the parent plants for your fem seeds, the easier the plants change sex, the lousier the fem seeds are.
But the really difficult plants to change sex, are for that reason rather difficult to work with. And so the question is; what kind of plants does one use to produce seeds, easy to-change-sex-plants (lousy fem seeds) or difficult ones which leads to good fem seeds. If you want to make life easy (and the fem seeds not so good) choose for the easy plants, and vice versa.
Fem.seeds should not be produced from the female plants which will produce male flowers or bananas after either stress, or when they are permitted to flower way passed their normal life expectancy, period.
If you do use those ‘easy’ plants then you will produce inferior fem seeds, which will be unfair for the customer, and bad for the reputation of fem seeds. Well, this is going on off course.
A change of sex has no higher occurance in fem seeds, it might even be so that this happens more frequent in reg. seeds but it is a rather difficult thing to test out. As you may know the environment influences the sexual expression of Cannbis plants. For example high temps during germing of seeds leads to a higher rate of male plants. People who give their germing seeds temps of 30 Celsius or higher know this from experience. They think the seeds were bad but it was their own doing.
What is going on here? This means that the same plant ‘decides’ to become male under certain circumstances. (Even some animals have the same trick, the temp of hatching eggs decide which sex the young crocodiles will have.)
Temp is one factor but there are more factors which influence sex and we do not know all of them. If in reg seeds a plant changes its sex, who will recognize this? If in fem seeds a plant (which should be female, right) turns into male it doesn’t go by unnoticed. As usual the seeds are blamed, but it rather is the environment. Which factor(s) exactly can be held responsible is unclear. But when growing fem. seeds, certainly if there are many together in 1 room, you better keep an eye open for these unwanted flip overs.
This changing of sex is strongly embedded in the cannabis genome and cannot be taken out. May be with genetic enginering we will, but I don’t think oldfashioned breeding can do this. So we have to deal with keeping an eye open.
Can we recognize these sex flip-overs? Certainly we can; those plants usually start with showing female preflowers. Then, after the onset of the flowering cycle you can see a full blown male all of a sudden. What is that a Hermie?? No, a hermie has male and female flowers in the same buds. This is a plant which was determined to be female but decided to become male in stead, hence the female preflowers.
The perfect harvest point cannot be pinned down to a certain day, plants are living objects and they develope differently for each individual, therefore you should always check the trichomes before harvesting.
After 53 days you should check one top bud of your plants with a handheld microscope (available in every growshop). You look at the trichomes (=cristals), they look like a mini mushroom, with a gland (=stem) and a head (=round ball on top of stem). You have to take a closer look at the heads of the trichomes.
When they develope they are clear and transparant, as soon as the plant starts to ripen the heads will turn milky, they get a white colour inside the heads and when the plant is ripe the heads turn amber (=yelowish colour).
The perfect moment to harvest is when appr. 1/3 of the heads of the trichomes are amber.
You look at one top bud and when in the area you are looking at has about 1/3 of the amber heads, you should harvest.
Simon.
HI, GreeenFingers!
I am sorry, but i was sick last week, because of my hernia acting up. My back hurt so bad I couldn’t walk anymore...oooouchh......
Simon was writing a very extensive e-mail to answer your questions, but he never sent it, i just mailed it to you.
I also have mailed with the other 420-forum member today, the other member who had a similar problem.
We are now in the middle of a thorough investigation about this issue and we will try to find out if the seeds you received have been switched (could also be a shop-employee who wants to grow some decent genetics and exchanged them for some bag-seeds he had...very unlikely,but possible etc.).
Since all of this is a mystery to us and none of this was your fault, we
want to make sure you have a positive experience with our original genetics.
We from Serious Seeds strive to make all our customers seriously happy.
We therefore will send you a replacement pack of AK-47 regular to the
following address:
*********************
Please confirm to me that this address is correct and I will advise our
shipping department to send out your replacement.
Aloha, Thomas.
(Marketing-Manager Serious Seeds)
ha ha Here are some pictures showing the development since the last update 
