We were delighted to have a bountiful passion fruit harvest this year. However, we got frustrated when they kept hanging on the vines high up in the trees until long after our holiday guests were gone.
My husband went out every morning to check if any fruit had fallen, and finally one day came in triumphantly with a perfect yellow one. He cut it in half and shared it with me. It smelled heavenly and we just slurped out the seeds and pulp. Then there were no more for maybe a couple of weeks.
When more started dropping, he realized they were rolling and not just lying right under the trees. Some of them went back pretty far into the bush and maybe eluded him for a day or so.
Most of them were fine, though they weren't all yellow yet. As they ripen their skins get crumply and messy looking on the outside. Then they are the sweetest.
But there were quite a few that turned out to have been nibbled. And nibbled in a very particular way - just an area of the skin was taken off. The pulp and seeds were still intact behind the membrane that contains them.
We thought this was very strange. Who would bite a passion fruit and not eat the juicy pulp? We thought about possible fruit bandits. So many possibilities.
Birds?
I saw some pearly-eyed thrashers up on the vines. I didn't think they would be content with just the skin, though. They have sharp beaks and can hollow out our papayas entirely, just leaving part of the skin hanging there. However, passion fruits have much thicker skin, and I didn't see any hanging ones that seemed partially eaten. So maybe not thrashers.
I have seen bananaquits pecking at our sugar apples, especially when the fruits are super soft. Again, though, they tend to go after fruit on the tree and anyway might not have been able to puncture the passion fruit skin.
Deer?
There are plenty of deer foraging around our house. Mostly they eat leaves and young shoots. Probably they would eat passion fruit lying on the ground, though I think they would chomp down the whole thing, not just nibble.
Iguanas?
These days we don't have many iguanas near the house. When I do see them, they are lounging around on the trees down by the pond. They are vegetarians and can climb trees or grab fruit on the ground. But they are more gobblers than nibblers
Bats
I thought of the local fruit bats - they are small and might be nibblers. I asked my friend Kevel Lindsay, who has done bat research on St. John, but he was doubtful since I wasn't seeing any damage to the fruits hanging on the vines. Kevel thought it could be either a hermit crab or a land crab doing the nibbling. And he also mentioned various insects that might also be attracted to a fruit lying on the ground.
Crabs?
We did see an enormous hermit crab roaming around out back during the passion fruit dropping period. It sometimes eats kibbles out of the cats' bowl and sleeps in the storage area. I put a partially eaten passion fruit in the bowl to tempt the hermit crab, and it crawled in to investigate but left without touching it. Maybe just not hungry.
Since we live next to the wetlands, there are large land crabs that often come by to scavenge along the ground at night. They eat fruits and leaves as well as insects and worms, and also check out spilled cat food. They are likely nibblers since their mouths might not be able to bite deep into the interior of the passion fruit.
All that's left of the passion fruits now are the seeds sprouting in various pots and a jar of frozen pulp I extracted for flavoring drinks. Meanwhile besides having fun gathering and savoring the tasty fruits we also enjoyed the backyard investigations of our creature neighbors.
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Gail Karlsson is the author of a new photo book Looking for Birds on St. John, as well as two other books about nature in the Virgin Islands - The Wild Life in an Island House, and a guide book Learning About Trees and Plants - A Project of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of St. John. Follow her on Instagram @gailkarlsson and at gvkarlsson.blogspot.com.