Strawberries are packed with bugs, disgusting microscope videos reveal
As if these treats weren’t “seedy” enough.
Strawberries might seem like clean eating, but the average ripened specimen could harbor a bug bonanza. Fruit enthusiasts are creeping out over an alarming video on Twitter that showed the juicy red fruit teeming with microscopic critters of biblical plague proportions.
“Are you having a good day today? I’m sorry for ruining it by posting this video of a strawberry under a microscope,” reads the caption to the clip, which boasts over 2.5 million views on the platform.
The ensuing freaky footage, set to ominous music, shows a scientist shaving off a slice of strawberry and placing it under a microscope. The camera then cuts to the magnifier’s-eye view, which shows small multi-colored mite-looking critters scuttling about on the surface.
The video set viewers’ spines a-tingling with one appalled commenter writing, “This is why you wash your food!”
“You have single-handedly ruined my summer,” said another.
This comes following a trend of related TikTok videos that emerged over the pandemic. It saw app users submerging strawberries in salt water — and then expressing shock as tiny worms emerged from the fruit like something out of “Monsters Inside Me.”
“Apparently if you wash your strawberries in water and salt, all the bugs will come out — which, I didn’t even know there were bugs in there,” says TikTok user Seleste Radcliffe in one clip while dumping a box of strawberries into a bowl of salted water. “Look at that, look at that,” she says, zooming the camera in on suddenly moving specks on the otherwise healthy-looking strawberries.
As it turns out, the strawberry colonizer is actually a spotted wing drosophila, a “very tiny” invasive fruit fly that likes to lay its eggs under the skin of strawberries and other berries. These become larvae and crawl out of the skin like a creepy, crawly pinata.
Despite their gag-inducing reproductive means, scientists reassure berry-lovers that they have nothing to fear, per Everyday Health. For one, “the larvae will be one-fiftieth of an inch — not even visible to the naked eye,” said Iowa entomologist Don Lewis. Even if we were able to spot them, it’s unlikely that grocery store fruit would harbor them as they’re killed by refrigeration, he said.
In fact, the only guaranteed way to see the critters is by leaving this seedy treat out at room temp for one to two weeks — whereupon the flies will grow to one-sixteenth of an inch. But by that time, the berry will be rotten and inedible anyway, according to Lewis.
Most importantly, there is no evidence that it’s harmful to eat these fruit interlopers, which are part and parcel of consuming food grown in a field. “The reality is that most fruits, stored grains, they have some level of insect infestation that is impossible to get rid of,” Sriyanka Lahiri, an entomologist at the University of Florida, told USA TODAY in 2020.
As such, experts advise against giving strawberries the saltwater treatment — a pest detection method commonly employed by commercial fruit growers — as this will likely make the berries taste immeasurably worse than a few bugs.
Bugs are not the only ubiquitous food stowaway.
Last month, scientists shared that grocery store breads could very well contain traces of human hair, duck feathers, cow horns and pig bristles.
