My friends brought this fruit they found back to our resort in Costa Rica, what is it?
It's coconut sized, and my braver friend said it tastes really good and similar to guava, although it doesn't look at all like any picture of a guava we can find, and it has a stringy but soft and almost avocado-like texture with small and flat/soft seeds. It has a very subtle but pleasant smell, like a flower or maybe a banana. We've looked at dozens of things, a few that were close but nothing seems right.
(Pictures of the opened fruit and the tree it was plucked from)[https://imgur.com/gallery/JJzub]
Posted Mar 18, 2018, 3:35 AM UTC
57
Reminds me of Crescentia cujete/ Calabash tree.
http://tropical.theferns.info/viewtropical.php?id=Crescentia+cujete
We thiiink this is what it is, it seems much closer than anything else. The only thing is that everyone makes it sound like it tastes bad, I saw a YouTube video where the guy tried it and said it tasted like a dirty mushroom, but both my friends said this thing was sweet, delicious and similar to guava, they were dying to eat more but we stopped them in case it was poisonous (which calabash is apparently). So I don't understand why it would have tasted so good if that's what it is. Also my friends don't seem to be poisoned, maybe they just ate a small enough amount but maybe it's something else.
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I don't think that's a Calabash, yours has fruit hanging from the ends of the branches. While calabash has its fruit growing from the trunk and magor limbs. Fruiting structures on plants are not that variable with their fruiting structure placement in a single species.
Interesting. Any thoughts on what it could be? I'm surprised by how difficult it is to find an answer, we thought we'd just see something and it would be obvious.
We did think it looked a bit like a cannonball fruit I think it is? We threw the rest away and today the fruit is all blackened, maybe it wasn't ripe yet? They said it was really hard to pull it off the tree.
My best guess based off of leaf shape, fruit discription and seed structure is that you're right with the guava ID. There's a Costa Rican Guava plant that seems the closest match to me.
Psidium friedrichsthalianum