Northern California - Funky Orange

Checked on my orange tree hoping I didn't lose my fruit to the freeze and found this thing.
I ate one of the other ones and it was a little tart still but pretty good.
Never seen anything like this though in 12 years of having an orange tree.

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_hSZo5vjiPmQ/Sx_HnU06uyI/AAAAAAAAIec/-duC8O8YCJM/s800/funky%20orange.JPG

Looks like it came from Chernobyl!:eek:

JB

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/9880/funkyorange.jpg..

If you sqint a little it kind of looks like that Alien thing. You probably want to step away from the orange...

Isn't it the way baby oranges are born? :innocent:

ewwww

http://home.comcast.net/~mr288sc/orange.JPG

Another fruit subject to such human-assisted reproduction is the ubiquitous navel orange. It, too, was the result of a serendipitous mutation, this one from an orange tree in Brazil in the mid-1800s. Each orange on this particular tree was found to have a tiny, underdeveloped twin sharing its skin, causing a navel-like formation opposite the stem. These strange siamese citruses were much sweeter than the fruit of their parent trees, and delightfully seedless. Since the new tree was unable to reproduce naturally, caretakers amputated some of its limbs and grafted them onto other citrus trees to produce more of the desirable fruit. Even today navel oranges are produced through such botanical surgery, and all of the navel oranges everywhere are direct descendants—essentially genetic clones—of those from that original tree.

Not quite what I thought, but the "underdeveloped Siamese twin" looks like it took hold somehow on my particular orange. There were a few others that were similar but not as big - this is the first year since I've had the tree that I've seen this. Reminds me of something I saw on a documentary about evolution - they had photos of a whale that had grown a partial set of rear "legs" and said that all whales have the genetic programming to have rear legs but they have also aquired programming to stunt the growth of those legs but sometimes there's a bug and you get vestigial legs (or organs or whatever in other species).


And yes, my daughter called it "the pooping orange".

To me, it looks more like a Mad-Max Masterblaster type situation.

Reminds me of Kuato from Total Recall:

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Another fruit subject to such human-assisted reproduction is the ubiquitous navel orange. It, too, was the result of a serendipitous mutation, this one from an orange tree in Brazil in the mid-1800s. Each orange on this particular tree was found to have a tiny, underdeveloped twin sharing its skin, causing a navel-like formation opposite the stem. These strange siamese citruses were much sweeter than the fruit of their parent trees, and delightfully seedless. Since the new tree was unable to reproduce naturally, caretakers amputated some of its limbs and grafted them onto other citrus trees to produce more of the desirable fruit. Even today navel oranges are produced through such botanical surgery, and all of the navel oranges everywhere are direct descendants—essentially genetic clones—of those from that original tree.

Not quite what I thought, but the "underdeveloped Siamese twin" looks like it took hold somehow on my particular orange. There were a few others that were similar but not as big - this is the first year since I've had the tree that I've seen this. Reminds me of something I saw on a documentary about evolution - they had photos of a whale that had grown a partial set of rear "legs" and said that all whales have the genetic programming to have rear legs but they have also aquired programming to stunt the growth of those legs but sometimes there's a bug and you get vestigial legs (or organs or whatever in other species).


And yes, my daughter called it "the pooping orange".
I was going to say that maybe the cold kicked the fruiting hormone into overdrive, but that is interesting about the siamese fruit. Never heard that before!

I've seen that with bell peppers before.