never said silver is a hormone... I am not an idiot as I hope you are aware by now
Silver simply masks or displaces the copper which the receptors require to detect the ehtylene which is a gaseous hormone
haha no I wasn't aware, but did not mean to imply.
Physiological pathways to plant flowering at a biochemical level are poorly understood. Still today people talk about "Florigen" the plant flowering hormone, but to my knowledge there is still no real identified "Florigen". What we understand is purely a causal relationship. Example. Shorten Days and Cannabis Flowers, supposedly because Pfr balance is changed. But after that nobody really understands.
The actual pathway that causes a female plant to produce male flowers is even less understood. There are a number of known external stimuli that can cause the change, but nobody understands whats happening physiologically. Ethylene is a gas, its known as a ripening agent and occurs throughout nature as bio material breaks down. Flowering in a number of plants can be triggered with Ethylene, which can be triggered by smoke from fires. But Ethylene is not a flowering hormone. If anything basic logic indicates that increasing ethylene during flower formation should increase the production of male flowers, since its the ripening hormone. However the action of silver contradicts that logic. In fact
anything that antagonizes the action of ethylene may cause the formation of male flowers.
It is absolutely presumptuous to assume that the action of silver does not trigger a common root pathway to create male flowers on a female plant that is shared with other environmental stress factors.
Shouldn't breeders take every measure possible to deselect for the tendency to produce male flowers on a female plant? Why take the chance of inadvertently selecting for that based on a poorly understood causal relationship?
Selfing a female plant is not the only way to develop a homozygous pure bred strain. It can be done just as well if not better with familial crossing and backcrossing. There simply isn't a need to force male flowers to breed improved strains.