Thank you Maurice. I'm a little confused as to whether this is a sport or a sport with a jumping gene. Or is the yellow flower a sport but the 2 flowers that had the split color are sports with jumping genes? Those are the parts that are a bit tangled up for me.

I greatly appreciate your explaining all of this to us & am finding it fascinating.

Another question I have & I may have missed the point in the explanation, is what caused this or these fans to suddenly deviate from being clones of their "mother" Flasher? Or do we know or can guess at possible reasons?

admmad said:
Clones are meant to retain the same qualities. So if the two fans of Flasher that have the yellow sections keep acting in the same way, then clones of them should continue to do the same thing (retain the same qualities). What that means is that any new fans made by those two Flasher fans should also show the same qualities. New fans made by a specific daylily fan are clones of that fan (except when relatively rare 'accidents' happen).

I can rephrase the explanations but could you please let me know which parts you are not certain about?

Now that I can understand. Thank you for asking Ann And Thank you for a clear explanation Maurice.

flaflwrgrl said:Thank you Maurice. I'm a little confused as to whether this is a sport or a sport with a jumping gene. Or is the yellow flower a sport but the 2 flowers that had the split color are sports with jumping genes? Those are the parts that are a bit tangled up for me.

If in the first photograph the yellow flower is on a scape on different fan from the reddish flower and all the other flowers on the same scape are the same yellow then those flowers and that scape as well as probably that fan are a sport. Seeing only those flowers we would not have any clues as to the type of sport or its possible cause. A sport means a change from what is expected and can be caused in several different ways. Usually a sport happens once and changes a part of the plant permanently.

The second photo shows two flowers that have sections of the other colour, one has smaller sections while the other has a very large section of reddish colour. From this photo we now have more clues to the nature of the sport. In this case the sport did not happen once only, it is continuing to happen in different flowers and in different times/sizes in those flowers. So the sport is unstable. So the sport may be caused by a jumping gene (we cannot be sure without detailed experiments, genetic analyses, DNA sequencing, etc.).

So all yellow parts of the flowers are the sports and the cause of those sports may be a jumping gene.

Another question I have & I may have missed the point in the explanation, is what caused this or these fans to suddenly deviate from being clones of their "mother" Flasher? Or do we know or can guess at possible reasons?

We don't know what caused the initial sport or appearance of yellow colour. There can be different reasons so although the reason may be a jumping gene it may not be and it may be something else (such as somatic crossing over). Even if it is a jumping gene we do not know why it would go from being inactive or not jumping to suddenly jumping.

Thank you so much Maurice! Now I understand. Your explanation cleared things up for me.

Now this is just a speculative question & I'm sure any answers would just be speculation but I'm a wonderer & I wonder what chance there might be that the "normal" fan or fans of Claudia's Flasher will "throw" more fans off that have the split coloration. It's something that time will tell & I will be sitting on the edge of my seat to find out.

I'm also curious about the future potential of those original fans! And, if they started throwing such interesting stuff after being divided and shared, was there anything about the process that would have sparked it? I'm starting to pay more attention, and notice a lot more flowers that open and show noticeable segments of typically shaped "stripes" on them of either white (absence of a color) or other lighter or darker shades, too. I'm grateful for how the simple act of looking really closely, and not just tossing pics or shaking our heads and putting oddities out of mind, really brings a lot of new insight to light right in our own back yards.

Chiming in here, since I'm the one that sent Claudia the split. My Flasher is completely stable, if that means anything.

I don't want to be overly pessimistic but there are many environmental causes for stripes and sectors of different shades of colour and missing colour in flowers. Most of these are simply one-off developmental glitches. When one looks very carefully one can almost find one stripe or similar anomaly in the majority of flowers. Both temperature and light have important effects on the presence/absence and amount of pigments produced. Different parts of a flower can be different temperatures and have different light/shade conditions so that variations in colour in a flower can simply reflect an unusual temperature or light effect that occurred during the development of that flower bud.

I would expect that Flasher is stable all the time and in all growing conditions. Typically events such as visible sports or mutations occur naturally about one in hundreds of thousand or millions of individuals.

Oh so glad Marna has joined in!

While still confusing to me, Maurice you are making it much clearer as I read & re-read your comments. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer peoples questions on this topic.

Marna! Very happy to see you here! Thanks for sharing your daylily with Claudia, and letting us know that your fans are stable. Certainly, if sports, stable stripes, color-splits and stippling were a frequent occurrence there would be no question that it happens in daylilies. What is remarkable is how very many stripes and stipples are now getting registered, seemingly exponentially and from all sorts of lineages (when know). And, the sheer number of starkly "split-color" blooms that people are able to document with pictures has certainly increased.

Until someone can document that a sport is more likely what has happened than a dropped seed or mix up, however, by showing connection to the original fan by crown or rhizome, it cannot really be known if a sport has likely occurred. And, same cautions apply for whether any split-color blooms would become stable or could be reproduced, whether through random, self-pollinated, or-line breeding practices. But sports are a big area of so many other plants (roses and hostas come to mind) that it doesn't seem like it would be quite so impossible as it is perceived to be. Not much to lose by trying some further hybridizing with such fans, though, as far as I can see.

Thanks for the welcome.

So if Claudia splits off the odd lily, would you expect more mutations from the primary Flasher, or is the ability to mutate only in the new fans?

So tough to get my head around this mutation stuff.

I would expect them primarily in the new fans. It is not impossible for the original normal fans of Flasher to have another sport but since these are rare in daylilies I would not expect it. In a similar case with Willy and its sport, Willy Nilly, if my memory serves me correctly, it never happened again in approximately 40 years of growing the original Willy.

When dealing with living organisms one should keep in mind that they do not obey our predictions and can act exactly opposite to what we think happens usually.

and you never know what genes may be lurking in the original, or any, plant (both a sport and split-color mutations from it - may be a lot going on in that clump of yours!)... and what great questions! I'll bet you'll be the first on her list to get a fan back as they increase, too, and could share pollen as well.

Catching up on threads this morning. With the moving of this thread from the Ask a Question forum to the Daylily forum we now have two threads on the same topic. Several members have said in this thread the two threads are confusing. We can continue the discussion on this topic in the thread that was originally started in the Daylily forum....

The thread "Do daylilies revert?" in Daylilies forum