Auxin

Not at all surprising, in fact I thought it was common knowledge. Pain killers train people to use pain killers. Even minor discomforts start registering as pain just to get a pill swallowed. Pain killers also strongly reinforce the notion that pain isnt supposed to be there, that rejection of the pain makes the pain get amplified quite a bit.

Lophophora hmm, firefox says I misspelled 'Loophole' But it has a little 'add to dictionary' button, so now mine knows Lophophora. And their is indeed a free addon to make it aussie spelling, I guess for those words like coloUr and bogan. There is also a free third party app [Link] I havent tried it tho.

Secretly is the key word. People love to overcompensate for their secrets by campaigning against the very things theyre ashamed to love, thats how we get all those family value homophobic conservative fanatics in politics who turn out to secretly be messing around with the office boy while fondling donkeys and snorting coke. Politicians suddenly running out of hypocrisy isnt what will stop this thing, nor will a popular uprising, what will stop it is, as you said, porn is about half of the internet. Theyd have to block the entire internet and then whitelist sites on a case by case basis and constantly review them. It would cost a godawful fortune and the trouble would never end.

opt out compulsive circumcision. Only the brave or circumcised would be stumbling drunk in public. PH, its not so much 'filters' that cleaned up searches. Its mostly three things.. ¤ Illegal sites got taken down ¤ My government finally stopped running pay sites with photoshop simulated child pornography to get perverts credit card numbers ¤ Search engines are now removing illegal search results That last one is the only thing close to a filter but its their right (or legal responsibility) to filter their service There are many people who never will opt in for porn despite wanting it, and others who will be paranoid about the government tracking their porn proclivities. If an opt-out filter were set in place there would be a tidal wave of new users on places like TOR and Freenet where no filter or law reaches. Ironically, the more a government tries to clean up society the dirtier it gets for those who get past the rules.

Unexpected happening, I had grafted a TBM clumper pup to pereskiopsis. It grew nicely, finished the first branch, and made its 'foreskin'. I moved it under stronger lighting so the coming pup would grow nice and fat. But it poked spines out of its tip. It now has six new areoles showing Do they normally resume column growth if lighting is changed?

Mendelian genetics, and the punnett square especially, are things every grower should know. For those that benefit from visual aids there is a cool tutorial on breeding tomatoes [Here] Page 1 is the most basic, you can then follow the link at the bottom to page 2, then 3 Not all traits are dominant or recessive, thats important to remember. They can be additive or codominant or otherwise messy, too. Like one time I had a pepper that ripened from green to red and one that ripened from green to yellow, I bred them making a F1 hybrid. As expected they matured from green to red (red is dominant over yellow). Then I selfed those, resulting in the F2 generation. As expected 3/4 were red, but the rest were orangey-gold! It turned out the strong red color from the original red pepper was just covering up a orangey-gold trait that is codominant with red but dominant to yellow. So even the simplest traits that are born out of only one gene pair can throw out unexpected results. Another thing to keep in mind when breeding is plastid DNA. Long, long ago parasites infected cells, but the parasites and cells started working together and became one organism. In some cases the parasites gave up their DNA, but in some they kept it. Thats how plants got plastids and humans got mitochondria. In hybridization the nuclear DNA gets mixed half and half but all the plastid DNA is from the mother. They are mainly controlling photosynthesis, some plant antioxidants, and energy metabolism (if there are other known plastid based cactus traits I'd love to hear them). So sometimes a trait might follow just the maternal line. And ultimately there is not always a choice which to use as mother. Pollen might be compatible one way but incompatible another way due to surface signaling molecules or just the pollen from a small flower species not being able to grow down a long flower for fertilization. If you plan to breed, make sure you have a digital camera with a macro setting. Being able to take ten thousand photos for the cost of two rechargeable AA batteries is a serious benefit to tracking traits without huge volumes of written records.

I had a M. bocasana make a fruit with M. sneaky-neighbor-cactus so I had to look this back up In the doin' I organized my data and put it in post 1, it covers about a fifth of the genus. And it looks like I may have got a few M. bocasana X M. rhodantha F1 seeds, yay.

Is there a database hidden somewhere on the web listing chromosome counts and ploidy of species of genus Mammillaria like the one for Salvia[*] ? The bastard genus doesnt stick to the traditional 2n=22 I keep wasting time making crosses that I eventually find out didnt even have matching chromosome numbers and I cant find a list of numbers! Heres a start: albilanata 2n=2x=22 angularis 2n=2x=22 armillata 2n=2x=22 asteriflora 2n=2x=22 bocasana 2n=2x=22 boolii 2n=2x=22 bombycina 2n=2x=22 brandegeei 2n=2x=22 compressa 2n=4x=44 crucigera 2n=2x=22 decipiens 2n=2x=22 dealbata 2n=2x=22 dixanthocentron 2n=2x=22 elegans 2n=2x=22 flavicentra 2n=2x=22 gemimspina 2n=2x=22 grandiflora 2n=2x=22 gummifera var. applanata 2n=2x=22 gummifera var. meiacantha 2n=2x=22 haageana 2n=2x=22 hahniana 2n=2x=22 huitzilopochtli 2n=2x=22 lanata 2n=2x=22 microcarpa 2n=2x=22 muehlenpfordtii 2n=2x=22 occidentalis 2n=2x=22 parkinsonii 2n=4x=44 parkinsonii 2n=8x=88 plumosa 2n=2x=22 prolifera 2n=2x=22 prolifera (Cuba) 2n=6x=66 prolifera (Haiti) 2n=4x=44 rhodantha 2n=2x=22 ruestii 2n=4x=44 san-angelensis 2n=2x=22 sempervivi 2n=2x=22 supertexta 2n=2x=22 vaupelii 2n=2x=22 woodsi 2n=2x=22 wrightii var. wilcoxii 2n=2x=22 zeilmanniana 2n=2x=22

Thank you. I expected thats what you meant to say but your previous brevity was a bit too brief, thats why I missed your point half-intentionally. N00bs and beginners would have taken you for the simplest interpretation. People consider your opinions and knowledge to carry a fair bit of weight, I didnt want people walking away thinking names were totally arbitrary and meaningless. The expanded version of your opinion does far better justice to your logic.

Cacti more or less have a size that they mature at, sometimes additional factors are needed too like a frozen winter or UV radiation, but grown on their own roots or grafted the size seems to be an absolute limiter. Willies can get to the flowering size on pereskiopsis quite easily, and many people get flowers in 8 months, some in less. I recently degrafted a real vigorous Icaro at the 8 month mark, it got to 4.5 cm diam and 12 cm tall on pereskiopsis. A good result... but far from the 2 meters tall it might need for flowering The biological theory is a plant cant reproduce until it undergoes a phase transition like our puberty, two year old humans just cant get pregnant, and in plants they have a roughly fixed age or size before they transition and become capable of producing flowers. So boosting a trichs growth by a year on peres might get it a year closer, grafting it to a much larger stock might speed things along more... but 'size matters' in the end.

Nice spread That first one looks quite a bit like the TPM (peruvianus monstrose) in post 1, last TPM pic especially. A few more spines on yours but yours is much younger and not under the sun. Has anyone noticed the spination on the TPM? Heres a good spine pic... Three spines, downward pointing long one, shorter upwards, none can really be called a central. Not quite the definition of a peruvianus

I think thats a rather extremist simplification. Or at least the way most readers would read it is. Its true, many named plants are just ordinary ones that grew well for whoever named them but to say all the names are meaningless is to say that PC, Juul's, and the circulating Huancabamba pachanois are effectively identical. Its also to say the TBM clones A and B are no different. A clone getting a name means that someone found it of particular value, the subsequent proliferation of that clone among collectors shows which are of particular value to other people in other circumstances. And then, as you indicate, theres the mere book-keeping. That includes collected knowledge of disease susceptibility, preferred climate and soil, etc., hardly trivial things to a collector. Our words we tag to them may just be half arbitrary small mouth noises and our thoughts just trivia meaningful only to us in the end, but being capable of discriminating between a plum and a peach, or a PC and a Huancabamba is hardly a useless endeavor. The cactus might not care, but people do. How would your studies of flower morphology progress without names and nomenclature?

Reverse transport of (supposedly RNA based) flowering signals does happen on bushy plants, I always thought it odd we dont see it on cacti. I've never seen a Pereskiopsis flower when its scion is flowering. Just one of those mysteries. Flowering paste a la florigen would be awesome and I've tried all kinds of wacky things like fumigating cacti with ripe apples for a week (ethylene), fumigating with methyl salicylate, feeding 5 µM benzyladenine or 0.01% ferrous sulfate, or 0.01% nicotinic acid, etc, etc, no luck yet. I'll just keep tormenting them until something works If hand sized palm trees can be induced to flower in erlenmeyer flasks there should damn well be a trick for cacti. In the seedling graft genetic crossover I described its not chimeric growth, stock DNA actually gets in to the scion cells and becomes immediately heritable. In E. chamaecereus X Other Stuff F1 hybrids the easily-detaching-peanuts trait is recessive, they often still make little stems but they dont just fall apart, so you'd have to dig the trait back out in F2+n if you wanted the stems to just pop off when you sneeze at them. Its a good way to tell if a chamaecereus your about to buy is pure bred or a hybrid form. It might be a nice trait, cross it with a TBM and give the plant a good shake and penises would just fly all over the place

From the searches I did previously, no, it doesnt seem anyone succeeded in that cross and I've not seen anyone mention an attempt. Chamaecereus will cross with Lobivia, however, and Lobivia X Trichocereus (ornamental species) do apparently exist. If a chamaecereus and a trich were bred together the cham. pollen might not be capable of growing down that long trich flower style, so either cham should be the mother or the trich style should be cut short and grafted together (if cham fails as a mother). Its too bad young cacti are so godawful hard to flower. In other types of plants grafting allows for a novel cross breeding strategy. In chillies, soy, tobacco, and many others if mature growth is grafted to mature growth it acts just like a cactus graft, and acts just like highschool biology books teach, the scion acts like its mother plant and none of the stock characteristics get in it and transmit to offspring. We all heard that dogma. The dogma fails in seedlings tho, if a seedling is grafted to an adult plant and immediately flowers the seedling sometimes absorbs a small portion of the stocks genome, like 5%, and that is passed to its offspring. Its a thing thats been proven dozens of times over. If that could be done with cacti, and enough attempts were made, that little 5% crossover could produce some rather interesting progeny! Thats why most of all I hope a hormone trick is eventually found to make cacti flower.

Rooting should be easy, E. chamaecereus roots its little 'peanuts' freely. I do the cold selection on purpose. On those two groups I had fewer seedlings than usual for my cold torture so I exposed them to -15°C for an hour, waited a month and did it again, waited a month and did it a third time. (They have to be thirsty when doing that and pre-chilling to 4° helps reduce shock.) That only killed 78% of the KG X SS02 and 86% of the SS02 X KG. When I have hundreds or over a thousand seedlings I eventually get down to -19°C and do the treatments closer together aiming for a 99 to 99.9% kill rate. What I desperately need for these projects is a way to make the survivors flower in 3 or 4 years, then real work could get done

Not sure this technically counts... The diminutive, easy flowering, and fast growing Echinopsis chamaecereus as stock to pups from cold hardiness selected hybrids between T. bridgesii 'SS02' and T. spp. 'Kimuras Giant'. Now to root them

-30°C is simply my freezer set on coldest, thats why I use that temp for my chilli pollens (which are shorter lived than cactus pollens). Standard refrigerator, with desiccation, does indeed buy you at least a few months for cactus pollen from memory. I read a post on that by a breeder on a BBS about 15 years ago, if my foggy and (then) drug clouded memory is accurate he said two months was fine at 4°C

I never said life without connection to industrialization was all puppy dogs and sunshine. I said when a village or group has an awesome thing going it should not be overwhelmed by corporations raping the world in the name of globalization or hedonistic and self destructive tourists porking their way around the world looking for thrills. And in practice situations are rarely at one extreme or the other, like your example of tourist dollars paying for 'access to clean water, electricity, modern medicine, education and more efficient sources of nutrition'. I wouldnt say no to that in a cholera epidemic that overwhelmed the local medical system. I wouldnt say no to that when the crops fail and my family has kwashiokor from trying to live on just manioc or yams. But conversely, supply those foreign funds for very long and cultures forget how to do without those artificially imposed luxuries. Then you just have permanently dependent impoverished workers and one more opportunity for a foreign company to exploit them making shoe laces or something. Cultures are collapsing left and right, people are forgetting all the old ways that kept their ancestors alive, all based on a brief orgy of oil and debt. In the flesh I know very few people who can cook, fewer still who can even identify an edible plant not in a supermarket, and no one who can prepare even the most basic medicine from natural materials. Its a very unstable, but apparently very addictive system. Technology, travel, and foreign philanthropy certainly have their place, but they should be the exception rather than the rule.

Cacti dont have to flower at the same time in order to cross them. Collect the pollen, desiccate the pollen, store sample in a hermetically sealed desiccated environment at -30°C. That should buy you a year to find a breeding partner. Indicating silica desiccant can be found in hobby shops with the flower drying gear. It can be regenerated in an oven.

Yes, applying selection pressure will let you derive novel plants. It just takes longer. Cacti are like wolves, they have lots of capacity for adaptation because without that they would have gone extinct. But breeding within a homogenous selection of one species is still a slow thing, depending on the selection pressure you apply. Take chilli peppers (easier to visualize) I once met a guy who went to the caribbean and saw a poor little granny with a chilli pepper stall. She grew peppers and sold the best to make a few coin, consequently she saved the smallest peppers for seed. Her scotch bonnet peppers were the size of cherries. The guy bought a couple, got home, and for 6 or 7 generations saved seeds just from the plants that made the biggest peppers. He ended up with scotch bonnets larger than golf balls. A case of intentionally reversing a previous unintentional selection pressure. You can also toss in new pressures. In 'horizontal breeding' for disease resistance the breeder chooses a group of plants more prone to the disease to make sure there isnt some biochemically simple resistance mechanism in them, then that poor genetic pool is bred for resistance to the disease. Again, in 7 or so generations a more biologically complex (and harder for the disease to circumvent) mode of resistance can be seen emerging from the pool. Its said that, in general, a animal species can be bred into domestication in as little as 20 generations by a skilled breeder. This is the slower type of breeding, arguably what we will eventually see done in cacti. It just takes time to expose and select new traits. Hybrids (either within, or across species) are like shortcuts to greater diversity from which a breeder could select. Cross a red jalapeno with a yellow bell pepper and Bam! you'd get a larger red jalapeno with a bit less heat and a bit less of the jalapeno odor. But if you wanted to breed for specific traits in a new stabilized cultivar line it would take a minimum of 7 generations in which you'd see many traits emerge or hide. (I mostly breed peppers, can you tell ) So yes, theres many possible routes in breeding, much of a breeders skill is simply learning to know which route to take, and learning how to interpret what is seen along the way.

It depends totally on the breeding group the prospective parents came out of. Some homogenous populations will give consistent, homogenous offspring. Others, not so much. Thats why I was careful to specify 'wide' crosses. An F2 from very similar bridgesii whos parents were all bridgesii will have very little variation and really arent hybrids. Throw one other grandparent in and there will be variation. But either way if you cross a bridgesii with a macrogonus the F1's will be far more homogenous than the F2's Your right its a complicated thing and when getting new blood lines we will rarely know the parentage going back several generations, but a lot can be worked out just by observation and from there it can just be played as it comes.

Thats where forums like this help ;) People do that, its becomming a common thing for people to graft seedlings to pereskiopsis to skip a year. Some times pups are grafted to more mature cacti, tho I've never seen the graft go to flower in peoples pics. Theres a hint on one of the threads here that H. jusbertii stock increases flowering propensity, although I dont know if that was meant to say it speeds the juvinile to mature phase transition, which is whats really needed. In regards to the columnars I've seen oddly little work done in this regard. Soil composition would be far more important, I believe, and there too I've seen little evidence of organized and systematic experimentation. Its an open field. Dont always think of breeding as single plants, think of them as groups and multiple coexisting generations. On an F1 (first generation of a cross) the groups are fairly homogenous and you could speed several plants along and even get their offspring started while growing some slow to see natural character. F2 is an explosion of diversity in wide crosses, but you could split each cactus in half and grow half fast, get F3 seeds from them, get them growing, and when you know what F2's were the best just massacre the F3 progeny from all the rest. Breeding is often an issue of complex record keeping and exploiting tricks to speed things along, as well as killing thousands of good plants to focus on the great ones.

One spot names come in useful is in shortening things. Selective breeding was mentioned, at some point names would get too cumbersome. Say you were going to do further breeding work with a cactus that was already called... (((SS02 X SS01) F2 x Trichocereus sp. 'Kimuras Giant') X (SS01 X Trichocereus bridgesii 'Psycho0')) F2 forma monstrosa Clone F When writing plant labels it would be far easier to call it 'Spiky Bob'

Back before 9/11 I flew across north america two and a half times, I honestly dont know if I toked up in the airplane toilet, actually I dont remember those plane rides at all, I was too stoned, but I'm certain I flew I do remember thinking it was awesome that the dallas airport had a bar that let kids in and allowed them to smoke, but I still had to find my way outside for 'fresh air' (bowls) so whatever happened on the plane it wasnt a stoner orgy. I wouldnt try that shit now a days with all the terrorism paranoia, every security guard wanting to sniff your shoes, grab your fun bits, and stick their finger up your... Yeah, not a good idea these days.