A pheno hunt is the process of growing a population of seeds from one cross or line and choosing the best individuals. Each seedling is a different genotype, so the hunt is a search for the rare plant that combines the traits you want. Winners are kept as clones (mother plants) and grown again.
In practice
A useful hunt starts with enough seeds for the trait you want. For a trait in 1 in 10 plants, 30 seeds gives you about a 96% chance of at least one hit; for 1 in 50 you need well over 100. Take a cutting from every candidate before flowering so you can keep the winner. Grow everything in the same conditions, number each plant, and score traits with notes and photos: vigour, structure, pest resistance, flowering time, aroma in late flower and after cure, yield, and lab results if possible.
Then rerun the finalists as clones. A plant that won the first round because it sat in the best spot often loses the second. Cull any plant that shows intersex flowers, however good it smells.
Don't confuse with
- Pheno (slang): the individual plant, "the gas pheno"; the hunt is the process.
- Breeding: a hunt selects from what is there. Breeding makes new combinations and stabilises them.
In grower slang, a pheno is one individual plant from a seed lot, usually numbered during a hunt, as in "the #4 pheno".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.The genotype is the set of alleles a plant actually carries, either at one locus or across its whole genome, as opposed to the traits you can see.A mother plant is a female kept permanently in vegetative growth to supply cuttings, so a selected genotype can be propagated as clones indefinitely.The daily length of light versus dark; photoperiod cannabis flowers when nights grow long enough, rather than at a fixed age.In cannabis growing, a plant (usually female) that develops both pistillate and staminate flowers or anthers; botanists call it intersex or monoecious expression.Selection in breeding is choosing which plants become parents, so that alleles behind the chosen traits become more common in the next generation.The phenotype is what a plant visibly and measurably is (shape, colour, smell, chemistry, timing), the result of its genotype acting in a particular environment.Cloning is propagating a plant by rooting cuttings from it, producing new plants that are genetically identical to the donor.A test grow (tester grow) is growing out a sample of a new seed line, often by several independent growers, to measure uniformity, vigour, chemistry and herm rate before release.Selection pressure is how strongly a breeder, or the environment, favours some plants over others, set by how few are kept and how demanding the criteria are.
