Nature
PUBLISHED
3
A big-ass berry has just earned the title of the world’s heaviest blueberry, weighing in at a whopping 20.40 grams (0.71 ounces) and measuring 39.31 millimeters (over 1.5 inches) in diameter.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.The ping pong ball-sized berry was picked in November 2023 at a farm operated by Costa Group in Corindi, New South Wales, Australia.
They submitted the freak fruit to the Guinness World Records who recently confirmed it was the heaviest blueberry ever recorded, swiping the title from a 16.20-gram (0.57-ounce) blueberry grown in Western Australia in 2020.
It belongs to a variety of blueberries known as Eterna, which are known for their long shelf life and large fruit size. However, even by their hefty standards, this individual berry was especially huge.
“Eterna as a variety has a really great flavour and consistently large fruit. When we picked this one, there were probably around 20 other berries of a similar size,” Brad Hocking, a Senior Horticulturalist at Costa Group, said in a statement.
“This really is a delightful piece of fruit. While the fruit is large, there’s absolutely no compromise on quality or flavour as would be expected when developing a premium variety blueberry,” Hocking added.
Botanically speaking, a berry is a fleshy fruit that typically has many seeds. That means avocados, tomatoes, bananas, and oranges are all technically berries.
While a huge strawberry weighing 289 grams (10.19 ounces) was grown in 2021, strawberries are not true botanical berries. Botanists call them "false fruit” as they are made up of multiple tiny individual fruits embedded in a swollen receptacle tissue.
If you’re looking for the world’s heaviest fruit, that honor goes to a pumpkin that weighed 1,226 kilograms (2,702 pounds), more than a small car.
Yep, pumpkins are technically a fruit. Fruits are defined as any seed-bearing structures that develop from the ovary of a flowering plant, while vegetables are any edible part of a plant that isn’t a fruit, whether it’s their leaves (like lettuce and cabbage), the roots (carrots and radish), tubers (potatoes), or bulbs (like onions and garlic).
