Shamans Golden Strain:?

[laughingwillow]

Man, this one IS getting interesting......

lw

[Bongo]

I can quite understand why Vanessa got pissed off after being invited over here to explain the situation only to be greeted with such hostility.
Asking her questions about her plants is one thing but telling her it is “BS” as she is in the middle of explaining was just a bit too much.
I can’t see how anyone who is trying to purposely deceive people coming over to a site like this and trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.
A rip off merchant would just refuse to do this as it would do them more damage than good for sure.

[laughingwillow]

I think you are over reacting just a little bit, bongo. These peeps have reportedly developed a previously unknown method to polinate an difficult plant to propigate by seed. SO there is this amazing entheogenic discovery and the guy decides to move his wares on ebay? I certainly don't consider Daniel Siebert god, but I would expect the shaman to have viable alternatives to ebay when he makes a disccovery of this magnitude.

If the guy worked as hard as it sounds for the number of years required to make this work and he's the only one on the planet as far as we know using this successful tek, I would hope he's understand/welcome a healthy dose of skepticism. Imo, using this skepticism as an out to avoid a discussion on the topic at hand would be a red flag.

Why sell on ebay when one little announcement of this monumental find to the entheogenic community at large would be all that it took to make all of those plants go away?

I'm guessing the general population of ebay could care less about his find. And I would expect to find buyers with little or virtually no knowledge about sally or its history when compared to the interest level of forums/sites/threads found at most entheogenic communities hanging on the net.

lw

[Bongo]

I am not overreacting & neither am I trying to get into a duel with TSTT!

I am simply giving them the benefit of the doubt due the willingness of the lady to explain herself. And as for the announcement on an entheogenic based discussion board such as this being the place to announce it as opposed to selling it directly on EBay.
Well, what can I say? Apart from we have just seen the reaction that they received while trying to explain themselves, haven’t we?
I am not saying they are Kosher & at the same time I am not saying they are scamming.
What I am trying to suggest is that they at least be allowed after being invited to this board to state their case, the opportunity to do so before they are torn to pieces.
I agree, it is a rather extraordinary claim to make but, stranger things have happened.
Ask yourself this question. If you were pulling such a scam, would you come over to a place like this and even attempt to explain it?
I certainly wouldn’t.

[TooStonedToType]

Bongo - you are overreacting.  Let the lady explain herself, if she cares to. She is an adult and her husband is a shaman.  I think she can take care of herself.

I didn't exactly tear her apart without giving her a chance to explain - gezz read the thread.  I said her explaination sounds like bs.  Really, she has answered very few questions here.

Actually, I said "This sounds like a complete line of BS. The lady admits the plant is practically devoid of salvinorin a. I would suspect it is completely devoid of salvinorin a as this is not a salvia divinorum plant. To get plants to seed once is extremely rare. To claim they have a breeding program is unbelievable."

Ok, later I admitted I might have read that wrong about the salvinorin, but I read it again and it seems she is saying they have a "breeding" progam whereas they have had multiple generations of seed after seed over a long period of time, so many in fact they were able to select plants for specific traits.

"How many generations of seeds to plants to seeds could have occurred by now?"

Winder tore her apart pretty good as well.  Winder: "Suppose someone has been working with salvia for 6 years and got seeds every 2 years. 3 generations. That is not too many generations for optimizing a strain. I am skeptical also."

[laughingwillow]

I don't think anyone has tore Vanessa apart. This is the first any of us have heard of a successful salvia breeding program which has been running for six years now. We are excited to verify, as this would be BIG news.

lw

[laughingwillow]

Here's the text from the link provided by tstt earlier in the thread

THE BOTANY OF SALVIA DIVINORUM (LABIATAE)
Abstract

Salvia divinorum, ceremoniously employed by the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, is endemic to the sierra inhabited by the Mazatec, its distribution anthropogenic. Plants spread vegetatively, fluorishing in shaded, humid sites, flowering sporadically from October until June. Flower nectar and corolla dimensions suggest ornithophily, and the only pollination event observed involved a single hummingbird, but other factors suggest that visits by birds to the flowers in their present range are opportunistic, and not a product of plant-pollinator coevolution. The species is diploid with n=11, pollen fertility is reduced, there is no active pollen tube inhibition within the style, but some event or process after the pollen tube reaches the ovary is aberrant, as no fully developed nutlet has ever been collected from a Mexican plant, and greenhouse cross-pollinations led to only 3% seed set. Hybridity is suggested, although intermediacy between two known species has not been recognized..

..............

No fully developed nutlet has EVER been collected from a mexican plant.

I'm guessing hybridization would be the most believable theory for me at this time. Maybe sally can be crossed with another plant to improve the viability of reproducing by seed and then breed the sal-a back into the new strain.

I'm also willing to bet the moth in question didn't coevolve with sally, either. Because if that was the case, there should be more wild sally throwing viable seed, imo. (The moths could have been eradicated sometime in the past, I concede, but we're talking about a jungle here.)

lw

[Bongo]

In that they have such a poor germination rate usually less than 1/3 would produce seedlings and
Of those roughly ¼ would fail to survive into mature plants then it was a matter of testing for
salvinorin A content which varied considerably from very poor to mediocre to a few with strong
content. So after almost 6 years of rejecting all but a few plants from each set maintaining clones of
each to produce many clones to try to improve pollination results we ended up with the strain we
now refer to as Shamans Golden due to its coloring and the fact that it cost us quite a bit in actual money
to get to it.(testing fees, greenhouse maintenance and other not considerable costs which we hadn’t thought
about in the beginning.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't take the comment highlighted above to mean the plants they are selling are void of S-A. It reads to me as if they weaned the ones with less Salvorin A out before arriving at the clone they are selling.

[space]

Numbers that fascinate me:

3% in the greenhouse and 0% in the wild (Mexico).  

3% ain't much but it is infinitely greater than zero.  This suggests two things to me:

Either there is NO effective pollinator in the wild, for whatever reason, and/or some other issue disrupts nutlet formation there (viral/fungal/parasitic/X factor).  

The greenhouse plants that have successfully nutletted were clones from the wild, and one might expect them to carry any infectious agent with them.  I believe the article we have all referenced also suggested signs of nectar "theft" (perforated rather than merely fed on)--perhaps the few plants that are pollinated in the wild are damaged before seeds can form.  

Based on what little field observation we have, the "no pollinator" in the wild hypothesis and the "disruptor in the wild" hypothesis seem equally likely though neither seems sufficient.

I mentioned one possible explanation for the lack of a pollinator (insecticides), but there are a number of others, such as climate change driving the extinction of a pollinator species or pushing the pollinator into a different climate zone; perhaps, as lw suggests, the lack of a coevolved pollinator, perhaps because SD is a recent (in evoluationary terms) hybrid; the arrival in SD's eco niche of a new predator that drove the pollinator to extinction.

I have a hard time getting past that big fat zero, esp. given the report of a hummingbird moving from flower to flower and back again...surely some plants would be pollinated in this process.  

The situation reminds me a bit of what happens with the American chestnut and the beech in North America due to invasive organisms:  the organism that attacks them does so as they approach flowering/nutting age, but the trees will often continue sending up new growth from roots, which seem to flourish until they, too, reach the life stage at which the invader attacks and kills the "tree"...the root system can survive indefnitely.  

Perhaps SD reproduces vegetally so well because the wild population, once readily capable of seed-based reproduction, is now the survivor of a blight of some kind:  only those individuals/root systems that excelled at vegetal reproduction would remain (which might have been very few).  Or the root systems, like those of the chestnut and beech, manage to continue send up new shoots but the invasive organism, microbial or otherwise (little bug/big bug) disrupts seed formation.

Hell, who knows?  Not me.  Fun thinkin', tho, way more fun than the work on my desk     Now, the really fun project would be to collect all the sages indigenous to that part of Mexico and start trying to hybridize 'em...plant sages, that is  :wink:

[Jupe]

Check out "The Barriers to Fertility".at the above referenced article.  Seems to me, that even with pollinators (birds, moths or humans with tools) available, there are some serious systemic problems with seed set.  

 Still quite willing to hear Shamans Palace tell their story. My green flag is still up!!! I wonder how the auction is going?  What price are they asking?  (my wireless is acting up, can't get there)  Great discussion here peoples!!

[TooStonedToType]

The plant sold for $16.50.  I emailed the buyer and invited him here.  Shaman's Ridge currently has no other ebay auctions running.

[winder]

Now the first time in a long while I offer skepticism, based on reason rather than emotion, it seems to have offended not the subject of the criticism but another and I wind up accused of tearing someone apart.

How dare I?  Frankly, how dare you!

Had I been trying to tear someone apart, I would have made the attack personal.  Either the claims are questionable or my assumptions are poor.  I have seen no evidence to better assert the claims I questioned or evidence to counter my assumption of the 2 year cycle between seeds planted and seeds dispersed and collected.

Frankly, I think ciriticism of my intent and tone is unfounded and unwarranted.  But keep it up, and I won't be around to criticize any more.

PPPPHHHHBBBTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is about as pissed as I have ever gotten here.
I am just stunned.  Stunned that a logical basis for examining a claim is treated with as ill-will.  Godammit all, I figured most anyone here who has some knowledge of my prespective would know it is rather scientific, but apparently not.

[TooStonedToType]

Winder:  Sorry.  I didn't mean that as you took it.  I was the one accused of tearing someone apart.  I was really just pointing out your post...you said about the same thing I did....obviously you where very polite with your questioning.

[space]

Winder, are you referring to TSTT's comment?

Winder tore her apart pretty good as well. Winder: "Suppose someone has been working with salvia for 6 years and got seeds every 2 years. 3 generations. That is not too many generations for optimizing a strain. I am skeptical also."

I don't think he intended that as a critique of your comments; personally, I thought your comments expressed a reasonable amount of skepticism without crossing any borders.  And I think TSTT meant to note cogency in your remarks, not offensiveness.

I have always found you to be eminently rational and logical.  In that spirit, I do wonder about a few things.

I am curious about the length of time required to bring SD to seed.  My cuttings have grown and flowered quickly under manipulated light, even when they are not large.  I frankly don't know how long it takes for seeds to form (I haven't tried, I just dig the flowers), but unless it is an awfully long time, one might produce more than three generations in the time referenced.

Also, if you have multiple strains (even just the known, named strains) to cross, then each generation could produce many hybrid generations--the numbers could then progress geometrically rather than arithmetically.

Finally, it sounded to me that Vanessa was referring to selecting individual plants with desirable traits and maintaining that strain vegetally.  

Certainly six years would be too few to optimize a new strain, but one could establish clones with some favorable characteristics such as increased temperature extreme/drought tolerance, and perhaps some with high salvinorin content.  The real task--bringing those two character sets together in a genuine optimization--would then begin.

In conclusion, I did especially like your raspberry:

PPPPHHHHBBBTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[winder]

Thanks to both TSTT and Space for allowing my venting.

I feel tolerated, even appreciated, again.

We are good.