Ok let’s try 16 y/o:
As with many terms related to botany and genetics, they’re slightly misused in the cannabis scene. A better word would be genotype hunting. This matters only because to understand what a phenotype is you first need to understand what a genotype is.
Even if you don’t know what cannabis is yet, surely you know what a goat is. As you probably noticed, not all goats look exactly the same. Some have longer tails, some have bigger ears, some look far cuter than others, some are huge, some remain small, some have blue eyes, others brown or amber. They are not all identical because they all have a slighlty different set of genes, which is like a recipe, a blueprint, of which half comes from the mother goat and half comes from the father goat. If mom and dad goat make multiple baby goats, those babies will get a slighlty different half of the each parent’s genes. One baby goat might look like its father when you look at size and horns, but that same goat might have its mother’s eyes.
Unless you clone goats, and unless you have an identical twin for example, all goats have a slighlty different set of genes. That is, they have a different “genotype“. How different varies a lot. Sometimes the children of two goats all look similar and are clearly children of those particular parents. Other times some of the children may look like they’ve been adopted. Sometimes the parents are second cousins and all their kids look very similar - you know the type. Sometimes one parent is white, the other parent a beautiful black Nubian goat and their baby goats look like a mix.
So, different goats, different genotypes. However, even when they are of the same genotype, they can look different. If an identical twin gets separated at birth and one baby goat grows up in the desert and the other in snowy mountains, and meet each other years later, they may not recognize each other because they grew up in different environments. This is because:
Phenotype = Genotype + Environment
So even when they have the same genes from the same parents, thus the same genotype, those genes might express themselves differently. Genotype is the blueprint, phenotype is the actual result.
In terms of cannabis, when you have an ibl (inbreed line), most plants in that family will be very similar. Which is a good thing if it produces high yield or other traits you prefer. It means you can grow seeds from the same parents and can reasonably expect all plants to produce similar bud, good when you want to sell the whole batch for example. But it also limits variation. So what we do is cross two different genotypes, like our skinny Nubian princess goat with a white goat, or for cannabis, an indica with a sativa. This results in a variety of plants, some more indica, some more sativa, some clearly a mix. If we cross some of these ‘children’ (into F2) we get a wide variety of grandkids, where the genotype is a different combination of the grandparents’ traits. We can (outcross) one of these grandkids with a completely different variety of cannabis again, adding even more variation to the gene soup. It’s in all that variation that we hunt for new phenotypes genotypes. Grandma may smell like oranges, grandpa like birdshit. Their kids may smell like either, or a mix. Their grandkids have more chances of smelling completely different than both grandparents.
An oversimplified example of what would better fit the misnomer pheno hunting would be purposefully lowering temps to see if some plants turn purple or can still thrive in colder wet environments. On the otherhand, what we see IS only the phenotype. To see the genotype you’d need to extract and read the DNA (or gauge by testing how traits inherit but that’s out of scope here).
