:smoking: ... the "semi-" part has never been clearly defined, it's rather arbitrary in fact.... yes, first time I saw it used was with Stitch and his early work with larger, Sati'-dom. long cycle crosses,... If they express autoflowering, or have very sensitive triggering is something of a pheno' dice-roll...
Fact is, rudi'/"auto" genes are used in several breeders photo' lines, like Female Seeds to speed blooming up... They are NOT F1s, like Sweet's F1FV's (also still light sensitive, but may switch gears more readily); Dinafem/HSO is edging into the FV game, Delicious has several now too, but again I'm not sure if they are the same as Sweet's versions. Dutch Passion's Think Fast is an F1-FV, and a damn good one! Sweet has a great read on their F1FV's in their section McDee, worth a look! The Red Mandarine F1FV I ran this year went into bloom 2 weeks sooner than the others photo's, at the beginning of August..
Point is, all these could be labeled as "semi-auto's"...
The whole autflowering phenomena is far more complex than most realize, and all but 100% certain there is more than one "mechanism", for lack of a better term, behind how it works,... A few very good private breeders we know here have found multiple auto x photo/photo x auto crosses at F1 showing pheno's with full autoflowering, so clearly the simplistic Medelian Punnet square inheritance thing is bogus, it ain't a simple double recessive gig!.... according to that, there's zero chance for auto's at F1. Anyway, the two I see are with ruderalis subpecies, and equatorial landraces... about as far apart as can be across the board, right?
Rudi's tend to found in tough, short season climates, and bypassing the usual light sensitive triggering is probably an adaptation to surviving in places that are too hostile to have them last and set seed by the time the light hours change enough to trigger,...
Now consider something very often overlooked about "auto'ing": equatorial landraces, "Sativa's"... these plants live their whole lives at or near 12/12, right?
And to that end, other breeders have found some landrace types that will show the odd autoflowering characteristics show up in their tents when growing! An example: a mate had a PNG landrace cultivar going in his tents, running 20/4, and had a few actually start to bloom -
... So he tested more seeds, ran at 24/0, and even then a couple showed up! This is rare, but not unheard of from what I'm learning these days,... yet another funny little trick Mother Nature tosses out, and no doubt it persists in wild populations because it too has some sort of survival advantage, or just isn't a liability under such conditions, or it would have been "selected out" by the usual evolutionary processes....
ppp
