Freaky conjoined watermelon and other weird fruit mutations...

Conjoined watermelons are about as rare as conjoined (Siamese) twins. They do not occur often in our eco-system and when they do, no one can say exactly why it happens. In China, this has happened twice in the last few years, the most recent earlier this month when Xiong Wei, a twenty-five-year old bus driver from Wuhan in central China harvested a rare conjoined watermelon in a field near his home.

He has been planting fruit in his field for five years. “It’s the first time for me to see such a weird shaped watermelon,” Wei told the press. Experts claim it is very rare indeed to see such a melon although another such conjoined watermelon was discovered in 2007 also in China in the Jiangxi province. In this case, the man who found it was a watermelon farmer who had been in business for a decade when this odd mutation occurred.

Mutations also occur in other fruits and flowers. They can be triggered by cold weather, temperature fluctuations or insect damage.

In England last year, a woman peeled a banana only to discover that the fruit was bright red inside. A man named Ken Morrish picked an apple off a tree in his garden and could not believe his eyes because the colors were split; one side red and the other green.

Horticulturists believe that these colorings are the result of random genetic mutations and in such rare cases, the red side is usually the sweeter one because it has been exposed to more sunshine during its growth.

Experts say that the odds of finding an apple with such a perfect line between the green and the red are more than a million to one.

It would appear that Shakespeare was right when he said: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dream’t of in your philosophy, my dear Horatio.”


/Weird Asia News/