What’s eating Gqeberha’s granadillas?
Tastes differ but what would devour the hard skin of a granadilla and leave the juicy, sweet inside?
Whatever the creature was, it must have had incredibly sharp teeth.
And yes, we all like different things, but this was surely taking it to the extreme.
When Seaview resident Toto van der Merwe went out into his garden earlier this week to check on his delicious granadillas, he discovered something had skinned his precious fruit.
“They were still green but had obviously been eaten while on the vine before falling off.
“The tough skin of the fruit was completely sheared away, but whatever it was had not touched the juicy sweet pith inside.
“I was intrigued. I’ve thought of various possibilities but I’m really not sure what it could have been,” the perturbed Nelson Mandela Bay resident said.
Clearly the mysterious forager had sharp teeth and a maverick set of taste buds. A genet, possibly? A weasel, a monkey, a bat, an insect?
When Weekend Post sent Wildline’s Arnold Slabbert a photograph of the massacred fruit, he did not hesitate in coming up with an answer — though it was not as exciting as one may have hoped.
“It was a house rat,” Slabbert replied confidently.
“Rodents gnaw continuously to keep their front incisors down.
“Sometimes it’s not just for eating. That’s why they gnaw electrical cables,” Slabbert said.
HeraldLIVE
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