What fruit is this? Identify a fruit from a photo

A ripe fruit is often the easiest part of a plant to identify. It is also the part you are most likely to meet on its own, in a market, a fruit box or a friend's garden, without the leaves and flowers that usually help. The identifier names the species that produced the fruit. That scientific name is the same in every country, which helps, because one fruit can go by several common names.

How to photograph a fruit

• Start with the whole fruit, side on, filling the frame, in even light on a plain surface. Identify that photo first.
• Photograph both ends. Some fruits keep distinctive parts of the flower: the large green cap at the stalk end of a persimmon or a mangosteen, or the crown at the far end of a pomegranate.
• If the results are unclear, cut the fruit in half and photograph the flesh and seeds. Cut a second one across if you can: some fruits are most distinctive in cross-section.
• If the fruit is still on the plant, photograph it there so the way it hangs is visible, and add a photo of a leaf.

Clues that narrow down a fruit

The skin

Skin texture separates many look-alikes. Hard, sharp, pyramid-shaped spines mean durian. Soft, hair-like spines mean rambutan. A thin, brittle, bumpy red shell is lychee, and a smooth, thin, tan shell is longan. Tight brown scales, like snakeskin, mark salak. A thick, deep purple rind with a green cap is mangosteen.

Seeds and the inside

• One large seed or stone in the middle: mango, avocado, and stone fruits such as peach, plum and cherry.
• Many small seeds through the flesh: guava, kiwi, fig and dragon fruit.
• Many seeds in a central hollow: papaya, with a cavity of round black seeds.
• Seeds each wrapped in juicy pulp inside a hollow shell: passion fruit and its relatives.
• Segments: citrus, and mangosteen, whose white segments match in number the lobes of the flower scar on the bottom of the fruit.
• A five-pointed star in cross-section: carambola, or star fruit.

Sap

A sticky white latex when the fruit is cut points to a limited set of groups, including jackfruit, fig and breadfruit and their relatives, unripe papaya, and the sapote family, such as sapodilla and star apple.

How it grows

If you can see the plant, note where the fruit hangs. Some trees fruit straight from the trunk and main branches, like jackfruit, cacao and jaboticaba. Lychee, longan and rambutan hang in loose clusters at the branch tips. Passion fruit hangs from a vine with tendrils.

Botanical fruit and kitchen fruit

To a botanist, a fruit is the part of a plant that develops from the flower and holds the seeds. That makes tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash and eggplants fruits, even though cooks call them vegetables. The identifier works the same way for all of them; for the plants themselves, see the vegetable plant identifier.

Look-alikes

• Lychee, longan and rambutan are close relatives, and all three have translucent white flesh around one seed. The skin tells them apart, as above. Pulasan, another relative, looks like rambutan with short, thick, blunt spines instead of long hairs.
• Sugar apple, cherimoya, atemoya and soursop are all Annona. Soursop is the one covered in soft, curved spines. Sugar applehas knobbly segments that pull apart when ripe, cherimoya's skin is smoother with scale-like markings, and atemoya, a cross between sugar apple and cherimoya, sits in between.
• Ackee is the best-known example of a fruit that is poisonous unless it is fully ripe and correctly prepared: unripe fruit, the seeds and the pink membrane around them are toxic. A photo identification is never a reason to eat it; follow a public-health authority's preparation guidance, such as Jamaica's Ministry of Health.
• Small wild berries are where photo identification is least safe to act on. Many red, blue and black berries look alike and some are toxic. Identify them for interest, not for eating.

To name the tree rather than the fruit, see the fruit tree identifier and the tropical fruit tree identifier.