The Photography of Dr. Jeff Harper

I spent last week-end in Hua Hin, Thailand.  While walking about the grounds of the Dusit Resort & Hotel with my 70mm Sigma macro lens, I spotted a Jackfruit tree fruiting. Wonderful.

The Jackfruit, I believe, arrived on this planet in the lunch boxes of Visiting Alien Creatures (VAC). They are extremely difficult to handle, and even more difficult to extract the bubble-gum-flavored bright yellow succulent interior fruit meat. Obviously, they spat (if spitting happened to be an anatomical option for the VACs) the Jackfruit seeds out, eventually spreading about the hills and lagoons of the Earthen tropics.  The Durian shares this same extraterrestrial, transpermatic origin.

Jackfruit begin as a thumb-sized main trunk protrusion.

This very young fruit shows surface organization.  I have no idea what these would look like on the inside at this point in their development.

As they grow, they begin to form their characteristic spinney surface.

The spines eventually become quite large and frightening, a common feature of fruit with extra-terrestrial origins. There is NO WAY you can convince me that this organism came up through some kind of Darwinian selection process on THIS PLANET . . . . NO WAY!

A fully mature Jackfruit is the size of a Grizzly Bear's head and can weigh up to 30 kilos (70 pounds).  It grows right out of the tree trunk on its own stem, not hanging from a branch, another common feature of non-Earth fruit origination. The leaves do not look like they would be featured in a dendrological field manual either.