WTF happened to this tomato?!? Tomato sprouts?

Do you live near a nuclear reactor?

I thought those were worms at first. Maybe a tomato plant met an alfalfa plant and your tomato was conceived like that Klondike Kandy Bars commercial.

vivipary

Cool

from: http://www.organicgardening.com/learn-and-grow/alien-tomato

If you’ve ever noticed a seedling growing inside your tomato- yikes! You definitely came across an unusual tomato. Only about one in every 10,000 has seedlings sprouting inside. It’s a rare condition called vivipary, in which the natural hormone inhibitors that keep seeds dormant within the fruit break down. While researchers are still trying to pin down what’s behind the problem, experts agree that either extreme weather while on the vine or overmaturing in transit could cause the tomato’s hormones to become unbalanced.

Your tomato was safe to eat, but it might not have tasted very good, says Stephen Reiners, assistant professor of horticultural science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Tomato flavor depends on dozens of different compounds—sugars, proteins, organic acids—and a change in hormones could upset this balance.

The tomato I pictured above was one of 4 on-the-vine tomatoes I bought sometime in the past week or two. I’ve had them sitting on my counter, still on the vine, since purchase. It has been somewhat warm in our place recently (~80 F), so I wonder if that had something to do with it. 3 of the 4 tomatoes in the “cluster” that I purchased had this going on. I’ve never seen this before. Very weird.

more interesting reading on this:

I had one of these a couple of weeks ago, and indeed it didn’t taste very good.

LOL!! I was too scared to try it.

Mutant tomato. Like that big ass shrimp off the Florida coast! Lol