Science Friday: Don’t Eat This Tomato

A Solanum ossicruentum enclosed in a prickly covering. Photo by Jason T. Cantley

“Yes, what you see above is, in fact, a tomato.

Crack open the spiky burr, and if the tomato fruit isn’t quite ripe, you’ll see something resembling the fleshy, seedy tomatoes you might find in your supermarket aisle. But the color will look more “like the interior of a Granny Smith apple—that whitish [color with] a little bit of green tint,” says Chris Martine, a biology professor at Bucknell University.

In a matter of minutes, though, that fruit will begin to turn redder and redder, shriveling up into a hardened, dark mass.

“It kind of is an unusual character,” says Martine, who described this Australian species, the Solanum ossicruentum, in a recent paper published in PhytoKeys. “I’ve collected dozens of different [tomato] species in northern Australia, and I very rarely run into anything like this, and certainly nothing that as quickly turns such a deep crimson red color.’” — Chau Tu, Science Friday