Comment by paulgerhardt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulgerhardt | Hacker News Reader

This article was from 2015 and debunked at the time. Both "starring" and "hollow heart" are known conditions in homegrown watermelons. This is what an under-pollinated watermelon looks like if you grow it yourself in non-ideal conditions: https://imgur.com/gallery/YPojgFh/ - watermelon flowers should be pollinated at least 8 times(!) per flower to grow a proper watermelon [1].

While not an expert, a quick search suggests that "starring" happens when the watermelon isn't exposed to enough pollen. "Hollow heart" may be due to excess water or nitrogen (though probably also pollen[2]). Both combinations seem possible and as a casual gardener I'm not even sure they're distinct. Commercial watermelon operations control for this. Google "starring watermelon" for dozens of examples.

As Reddit later pointed out other contemporaneous examples of watermelons look fairly modern: https://imgur.com/a/zN8Kv

edit: Apologies for not seeing Vox later issued a bad correction to the original article at the end. Reddit was divided into three camps saying these watermelon's were under-watered, under-pollinated, or underripe. The "correction" only addressed the "underripe" claim. Vox states Stanchi's watermelons are not underripe - while technically true - they don't address that they are not under-pollinated or under-watered.

[1] https://homeguides.sfgate.com/watermelons-need-pollinated-75...

[2] https://www.mashed.com/158254/the-false-watermelon-fact-you-...

[3] The more "webbing" a watermelon it has the more it was pollinated, the sweeter it is. That and more watermelon tips here: https://imgur.com/gallery/SN8jl

That specific claim is covered and debunked in the article. Short version: the seeds in the painting are black, which means the fruit is ripe. This won't happen to "starred" melons.

Isn’t it also possible that the painter simply took some artistic license and decided to render the seeds in the nice glossy black that everyone is familiar with? This does not seem less plausible than the more elaborate hypothesis suggested in the article.

Seriously, it’s a painting now a photograph....

You might want to read the whole article. It's interesting.

I suppose you are referring to this part:

> "In the painting, the black seeds indicate that the fruit has reached maturity," Wehner says.

There's also the possibility the painter simply decided to add black seeds because it would look more like a mature fruit.

Yeah, that's a good point about artistic license. We can't take one artist's representation as gospel. Imagine a future where only cubist paintings survive. Will future humans think we looked like that going only by the paintings? I hope not...

I hope they would consider multiple credible sources corroborating the same thing. Is there a newspaper article from the time that describes watermelons as they are painted by Stanchi? Ads showing them as such? Is there a diary from a farmer that talks about how watermelons look and how they ripen, etc.?

Maybe there is, but the article sure isn't letting us know about it...

The update also notes that -- contrary to the major theme of the piece -- watermelons as depicted in the painting have not been lost. We don't grow them because we don't want them, not because we can't grow them anymore.

> "Museum paintings are an interesting method for studying old cultivars [varieties], and the one you indicated certainly shows the sort of watermelons that Europeans had to eat in the Middle Ages during their summer harvest season," Wehner says. "We have cultivars like that one in the painting available to us now from our germplasm collections [a sort of genetic sample library that includes many different varieties]."

> He notes that those samples, when grown today, have "large white areas, low sugar content, [and] frequent hollow heart." Hollow heart can cause a starring appearance somewhat similar to an unripe or underwatered melon.

So no, we don't need further corroboration from the 17th century, because we still have watermelons that look like that today.

No matter whether or not we are actually looking at an extinct variety here, I found this article on an archeobotanist approach fascinating: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fruit-in-renaissance-a...

Essentially they look at old paintings for unknown fruit varieties and then try to find plants or seeds from the same area that still have those features and try to match paintings to fruits.

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