Male selection is choosing which males to breed from. A male contributes half the genes of every seed he sires, so his choice matters as much as the female's. Because males do not produce bud, breeders judge them on indirect traits and, best of all, on their offspring.
In practice
Breeders start with many regular seedlings and keep the males that show vigour, good branching, strong stems, resistance, sensible flowering time and good aroma when stems are rubbed or early flowers open. Some males also show resin on calyxes and leaves. Unwanted males are culled before they shed pollen.
The real test is a progeny test: cross the candidate males to the same female, grow out the seed from each, and see which male's offspring are best. Keep the winners as clones or store their pollen, so a proven male can be used again.
Don't confuse with
- Pheno hunt: usually means selecting females for flower.
- Feminised breeding: skips males entirely, and with them half of selection.
Myth check
House position: males are a necessity and are encouraged and rewarded on GenetixBay. The male showcase is the Stud Book. Selecting males carefully is one of the clearest differences between breeders and pollen chuckers; see breeders vs pollen chuckers.
A gene is a stretch of DNA that carries the instructions for one functional product, usually a protein such as an enzyme, and is the basic unit of inheritance.A seedling is a young cannabis plant from emergence of the cotyledons until it has several sets of true leaves, typically the first 2-3 weeks.Botanically, the sepals of a flower; in female cannabis a thin, reduced perianth on the ovary, though growers use the word for the resinous bract.A progeny test judges a parent by growing out and measuring its offspring, the most reliable way to know what a plant, especially a male, actually passes on.In grower slang, a pheno is one individual plant from a seed lot, usually numbered during a hunt, as in "the #4 pheno".Feminised seed is seed made by pollinating a female with pollen from another female (or itself) that was chemically reversed, so nearly every seed grows into a female.The Stud Book is GenetixBay's showcase of documented male plants, with selection journals, keeper details and sire credits; males are encouraged and rewarded.A pollen chucker is someone who crosses two popular plants, skips selection and testing, and sells or spreads the seed as a new line.Selection in breeding is choosing which plants become parents, so that alleles behind the chosen traits become more common in the next generation.Regular seed comes from a normal cross of a female and a male, so it produces roughly half female and half male plants.Pollen is the fine powder released by male flowers that carries the male gametes; when it lands on a female's stigmas it fertilises the ovules and produces seed.A test cross mates a plant of unknown genotype with one that is homozygous recessive for a trait, so the offspring ratios reveal what the first plant carries.
