Someone's Claiming Their Friend Cut Open a Watermelon and Found This

It's that time of year. Head out to your garden, local farmers market or grocery to pick up a big watermelon slice it open and ...

This watermelon is one that a redditor claims was purchased at Costco. (Photo: Imgur via Reddit)

Wait a minute. That's not what a watermelon looks like -- or is it?

This is what one redditor titled "My friend just cut open a watermelon from Costco."

The photo quickly jumped to the top of the social news site Tuesday afternoon.

Now, the original poster of the photo doesn't make further claims either way. It could be that the friend just cut the design into the melon, but for discussion's sake, let's assume all the person did was cut it in half after purchasing it.

What's going on here?

Here are a couple of the more credible-sounding redditor theories:

dildologist: It was severely under-watered and it isn't ripe. Almost all big market watermelons are shipped under ripe so that they can ripen during transport and waiting to be sold. If you can, buy watermelons from smaller vendors.

As for watering, keep the soil consistently moist if you have a drip feed, no water logging though, as it will kill the plant. The leaves will look dead/wilting during the hot hours of the day, but at nightfall should regain their lushness.You can tell a melon is ripe by the slight yellowing/fading on the bottom of the melon. If it looks completely green and you can see the stripes all the way around, it is not ripe. Most people assume a uniformly green watermelon is the best (it looks more appeasing than the yellowing found on actual ripe melons) and this is where they make the mistake.So long as there are no cuts or bruising, you will be fine.MCShellalegh: I've seen this a few times on my family's farm. If a watermelon patch and a tomato patch are in close proximity to one another, the border produce items occasionally cross contaminate one another. This is one of the best hybrids I've ever seen. We call them watermatolons. Wah-ter-mate-uh-lons. I've also seen a few tomatoes develop stripes, but they often die before fully ripening.

prjindigo: Overfertilized but exposed to the wrong PGR, notice the seeds are flat and white. This is an accidental hybrid from having the beds too close together.

A mule-mellon

Then, if you take a look at some other cross sections of watermelons, you can see the swirled design that appears in some. So the design is at least naturally occurring.

You can see a similar design in this slightly more ripe watermelon half. (Photo: origami_potato/Flickr)

Here's a head on view. (Photo: Shutterstock.com)

Then there's this YouTube video showing what the description states is "what [...] a dried watermelon" looks like:

If you've ever seen anything like this of your watermelons, let us know in the comments.

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