A Little Statistics Lesson

It's fun to try to predict the offspring from your CannabiSL breeding activities. Several of your plants' characteristics can be calculated in advance of breeding. For example, height and width are simply the averages of the mom and dad plants' height and width. Just look up the stats for the parent plants, and grab your calculator!

Potency, growth rate, and indoor/outdoor lighting requirements aren't hard to predict, either. Again, look up the stats. Beside each text label like "very high," you'll see a numeric value. This is the actual breeding value for that plant. When the text labels are applied, the value is rounded up or down and then used to look up the label on a scale of zero (0) to four (4). When breeding into advanced generations, it's a good idea to check those numeric values, since two plants can have the same text label but almost a point difference in their actual breeding potential. For example, two plants might display a "medium" growth rate, yet one could be "almost fast" (2.4) and the other "almost slow" (1.5).

These characteristics show up in the offspring as averages, too. If you're able to plan your cross-breeding pairs, you can engineer plants that have higher potency, slower growth, and larger or smaller sizes. Couple that with a cool foliage, and you will have created a unique strain!

Other characteristics add an element of chance to the breeding process. As almost everyone knows, males are always in demand among breeders. That's because when a seed or seed brick is germinated, there's only a 13% chance of getting a male. And you can't breed your females without a male.

There are other odds-based inheritance patterns, and they add an element of surprise to the breeding process.  There's a 25% (one in four) chance of getting a bright mutant, and a 20% (one in five) chance that the offspring will inherit the father's foliage. Dwarves, giants, and ultra-fasts are even rarer. These mutations can affect the growth and appearance of future generations as well.

It's essential to understand one thing about statistics: The odds are the same for every seed you germinate. That means that it doesn't matter if you've already germinated four or five seeds from the pack, the odds that the next one will be a male are still 17%.

So... What are the odds of getting a bright male dwarf ultra-fast that has his father's foliage? If you know the individual odds it's not hard. Just multiply.

    Odds of bright = 25%
    Odds of male = 17%
    Odds of dwarf = 2%
    Odds of ultra-fast = 1%
    Odds of father's foliage = 20%

    In other words, what is 25% of 17% of 2% of 1% of 20% ?
    Remembering to convert percents to decimals, calculate it as: 
   
    0.25 x 0.17 x 0.02 x 0.01 x 0.20 = 0.0000017 = 0.00017%

That's slightly less than one chance in 5,000! So get planting - you might get one from the next seed you sprout!