Why only males in some cultivars hermie?

I've often ran seeds where only the males in the seeds (that all came from the same plant) would hermie, yet the females won't hermie.
I stress tested all the males and females under the exact same conditions, but only the males would hermie.

Is this just by chance or is it possible that a trait can only appear in the males, but not the females from the same type of seeds?

sometimes its selected for as talked about by dj short, those males when fertile create an increase in % of female seeds. suspect its thai related, 100% guess tho.

hard to say what exactly causes it. might be something with the sex chromosomes themselves, or something to do with hormone sensitivity or production.
but I recently had a strange experience like that too. I have a line I selfed to stabilise it, and I wanted to bring back the male in it by backcrossing it repeatedly.
so I selected(pretty much randomly, since in this case its traits don't matter) a male to cross, the male I ended up with that was at the right stage of flower at the right time was a pretty compact male. the kind of grow structure that makes me a bit suspicious it's a male hermi, and in this line this 'male' came from I've encountered male hermi's before.

but I watched the male, and it was solidly male till I killed it after pollination, no female flower in sight. so I thought it was ok.

sowed a bunch of seeds to get a male to cross to the recurrent parent again, I sowed around 15-20 seeds to be sure I'd have at least 1 male.
but every single one of those seedlings turned out female! (I did not grow them past the first flowers to see if they would end up herming, I was only looking for a male so everything that showed as female got killed immediatly).
so either I have the worst luck ever, or something fishy is going in the the genetics there, my suspicion is that 'male' was not really a full solid male as it appeared to be. so I'll have to restart the project with a different male.

africaseeds said:

I've often ran seeds where only the males in the seeds (that all came from the same plant) would hermie, yet the females won't hermie.
I stress tested all the males and females under the exact same conditions, but only the males would hermie.

Is this just by chance or is it possible that a trait can only appear in the males, but not the females from the same type of seeds?

Click to expand...

You mean the males turned into females? It's usually the other way around. Am I missing something here? Boys do have balls!

So my limited understanding of Monoecious males is that often the males express the monoecious traits more readily than the females because in general males flower faster and longer. I am under the belief from my experience that a considerable amount of genetics out there will express monoecious traits if allowed to flower for longer than the normal harvest window. Now if that is traits passed from parental generations all the way down to modern hybrids or if that's just Cannabis would be hard to say. I think we see more monoecious traits expressed in males because they can flower so much faster and normally extend living past their harvest window. I'm also sure that selection has a ton to do with it. Finding traits you need to see more of in a line you're working might require you to select a male who leans towards intersexed or semi infertile.

I have had this happen recently in a NL line that has been kept around for a while. Male went female. I did keep pollen sacs that opened before it went full blown lady whiskers and belive I made some seed, but never tested it....

Ive been reading about the monoecious qualities of hemp and papers seem to cite that specifally monecious hemp lack male markers...sounds like a racket on my end but these are recent papers dealing with hemp genomics, need to dig

This might line up wity what Rob and Sam S. have argued vigourously over the years that a hemp population is not natural, and with no make marker it has to resort to other ways! Regernation [sex] has powerful appeal, no?

Where does a gynodioecious type of population fit into this? Seems like these scenarios fit that type of population......

rizraz said:

So my limited understanding of Monoecious males is that often the males express the monoecious traits more readily than the females because in general males flower faster and longer. I am under the belief from my experience that a considerable amount of genetics out there will express monoecious traits if allowed to flower for longer than the normal harvest window. Now if that is traits passed from parental generations all the way down to modern hybrids or if that's just Cannabis would be hard to say. I think we see more monoecious traits expressed in males because they can flower so much faster and normally extend living past their harvest window. I'm also sure that selection has a ton to do with it. Finding traits you need to see more of in a line you're working might require you to select a male who leans towards intersexed or semi infertile.

Click to expand...

I actually have a Monoecious male in veg showing both pistils and stamens pre-flowers, so it kind of blows your "long flowering" theory out the water I guess. Maybe I'm miss understood your post?

Switcher56 said:

You mean the males turned into females? It's usually the other way around. Am I missing something here? Boys do have balls!

Click to expand...

So the males would later show female flowers (so in other words they would hermie). But the females that I got would not show any male flowers (so in other words the females would not hermie).

I had this happen with quite a few seeds. Even with one seed from quite a reputable breeder.

I do stress test them extremely hard though.

So out of 6 or 7 hermies I had, only one of them was a female showing male flowers...all the others were males showing female flowers.

RoyalFlush said:

I actually have a Monoecious male in veg showing both pistils and stamens pre-flowers, so it kind of blows your "long flowering" theory out the water I guess. Maybe I'm miss understood your post?

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Well who knows man. Could also be in your case that whatever line you're currently working has ruderalis or monoecious traits in it. I was more speaking about lines that seemingly had no reason for the expressed traits. I'll give examples so I can be more clear.

I have a US landrace "Hemp" strain that is monoecious. All the males of that line have either shown both sexes of preflowers or late in flower shown pistils on otherwise male plants. The females are the same.

I also have a few ridiculously old "Old timer's haze" males from Ace. Late in flowering these males will sometimes develop pistils.

Now both likely have genetic causes but I expect that my Old Timer's male shows pistils because of the extended flowering time I let him go for a long time to collect every drop pollen I have whereas my US landrace is just straight up monoecious.

With how many Poly to poly crosses are out there now it would be hard to say if a male didn't just intersex because it ended up with a bunch of genes otherwise not associated with that cultivar. It could hypothetically, show everything that's normal in the line and have genetic monoecious flowering traits and is a male. Traits likely from a monoecious ancestor. Otherwise it could be possibly tied to the male expression of hormone production or like djonkoman said, it could be hormone sensitivity. Like under stress a monocious trait associated with male hormone production expresses itself more predominately. I'd guess djonkoman got the closest guess with the idea that male hormone development might be the tied to monoecious ancestral traits or the stress might express hormone sensitivities in the males that are tied to intersexing.

africaseeds said:

So the males would later show female flowers (so in other words they would hermie). But the females that I got would not show any male flowers (so in other words the females would not hermie).

I had this happen with quite a few seeds. Even with one seed from quite a reputable breeder.

I do stress test them extremely hard though.

So out of 6 or 7 hermies I had, only one of them was a female showing male flowers...all the others were males showing female flowers.

Click to expand...

I had this happen with quite a few seeds. Even with one seed from quite a reputable breeder.

I do stress test them extremely hard though.

So out of 6 or 7 hermies I had, only one of them was a female showing male flowers...all the others were males showing female flowers.[/QUOTE]

Last ideas I had is maybe the females would have also intersexed just much later in the flowering period, possibly post the normal harvest window. This would point again to males expressing traits and flowering faster.

I will also add, I am not saying I have the right answer. Just offering my experience with monoecious males and my hypothesis as to why they intersex and some ideas to explore as to why this is seemingly tied to only males for africaseeds.

africaseeds said:

So the males would later show female flowers (so in other words they would hermie). But the females that I got would not show any male flowers (so in other words the females would not hermie).

I had this happen with quite a few seeds. Even with one seed from quite a reputable breeder.

I do stress test them extremely hard though.

So out of 6 or 7 hermies I had, only one of them was a female showing male flowers...all the others were males showing female flowers.

Click to expand...

how to decide if it's a female hermieing male parts?
or a male hermieing female parts?
the more common view(I think) is predominant expression first
then the other parts show up after
but is it the 'truth'? I'm getting the feeling it's a bit arbitrary
intersex is a complicated beast