ITs not rocket science..you are all throwing home grown ideas at a well documented biological occurrence.
You all forget mj is a plant, and scientists have studied plants for fucking years.
Hormones build up at night, and diminish during the day. Once the night period goes for long enough that the threshold is reached for the hormone that stimulates budding, a permanent hormonal change happens in the plant. It hits "puberty".
Just like a human, once a girl starts ovulating (producing eggs, for male genetic material to fertilize) there is no way to just change her back to a little girl..her hips will grow, as well as breasts etc..well you cant expect a plant to revert PHYSICALLY either.
In fact, once the plant has began to produce its reproductive organs it expects things to happen in an exact order...see its timed in nature so the female plant will have maximum potential flowers open and ready, when the male opens his pollen sacks...the light cycle is just a timing event so all the plants reach sexual peak at the same time..no good having all the females finish budding and start to wilt, then the males drop.
If you put a plant that thinks it is going to get pollen any second, back into vegetative growth cycle it panics...not the rush of thoughts panic that humans get, but a biological check..to make sure it WILL be pollinated..if the light cycle is wrong there's only one way the plant will reproduce (its whole purpose of living)...thats to pollinate itself...it will do this EARLIER in the flowering cycle to midway, not towards the end. There has to be time for the flowers to close up and seeds to form, or its useless. This is a hermie.
Plants establish a set of 2 "baselines" of light
per phase. (germ, seedling, veg, flower, ripen) Darkest period, and lightest...thats why plants can still grow in moonlight, streetlight or anything else..as long as the plant isnt SATURATED.. put a few red and blue LEDS on your plant during lights out (from the start), all through your grow.dont move them or add more or less..just leave them there...the plant will establish that when the leds are on this is night even though there is technically enough light to photosynthesize. (not gonna grow more than a few grams if that was the only source, but there IS energy production.) EDIT: - (NOTE: The leds can be on 24 hours, or off during the day...your usual HID light will be on during "daytime"..so as the OP said (correctly) its relative....there must be darkness relative to the light.) (inside the sun a 400w hps globe is PITCH BLACK, relatively. as in it puts out NEGLIGIBLE light compared to the sun itself when at point blank range..you need to show your plant significantly brighter day than night.) - so if you trained your plant that night means pitch black, a crack of light is relatively BLINDING. If you trained it that a 45 watt incandescent is night, and 3x1000w is day, then thats what it will know.
Nature had to build things dynamically like this, as the planet changes...what if all of a sudden the moon shifted orbit, and refllected 20x more sun...all plants would die if they didnt adapt.
As others have said, i could have hand delivered a nobel prize winning biologist, who could stand up, and tell rollitup the same thing i just did, and people would STILL say he was wrong! They will believe what they want..and so will you...
Bottom line is:
If your grow room is pitch black 0lux - You wont be able to let any light in, without RISKING the female pollinating herself.
If your room isnt quite pitch black you set that "hair trigger" hermy button to be a little less sensitive.
Plants can be re-vegged of course...but they dont suck their flowers back in...the flowers that have formed will eventually fall off as they are no longer getting the hormonal signal to grow. Regardless of this the plant is still mature. It should have alternating nodes and preflowers on all new growth.
There are so many strains of this one plant that its literally impossible to know now what triggers what...in nature its easy..the sun does what it does the same every year so plants RELY on this stability to survive..if a plant is mutated and for instance the mutation causes the flowers to be blue, every seed that comes from that plant or any of its offspring (blue or not) have a chance at being blue too...the same way a triploid plant mutated an extra set of chromosomes to develop 3 leaf sets per node...this was only obtainable by doping seeds with a chemical (starts with c if i remember right)...but now its something we see in seeds that have never touched this chemical...someone grew a female triploid out, crossed it with a male, then sold or gave away the seeds. Others then used those seeds, with that genetic possibility in it, to breed their own strains...now you can get triploid plants out of a variety of strains...I had one on a double gum plant
.
prot
PS: Its hard to not go from here into genetic variance and natural selection...so im cutting myself off here lol..sorry if i left any points unfinished! I just had to delete 2 paragraphs and i cant seem to stay on topic
