Common Cat facing and weather or Pests?
 

I have a couple of tomatoes that have some unusual damage. Lets start with the mildest first, and work up to the really ugly. :lol: Is this Thrip damage or weather/environmental damage?


[url=https://flic.kr/p/Xk4ZwW][img]https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4381/36315414542_d1483bf7f9.jpg[/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/Xk4ZwW]IMG_1804[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/152340683@N05/]Susan Albetski[/url], on Flickr

[url=https://flic.kr/p/XvTv4b][img]https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4403/36437849076_6e78fd3703.jpg[/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/XvTv4b]IMG_1806[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/152340683@N05/]Susan Albetski[/url], on Flickr



Now for the really ugly, lol. :twisted: Is this just cat facing or worm damage or something else? All the tiny holes in the scarred area are what are making me wonder what it is. Did something just eat into it and reach the gel/seed area and it just scarred over, or are those wholes mad by an insect of some kind?

[IMG][url=https://flic.kr/p/XnPvAV][img]https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4344/36346538501_51e045fa83.jpg[/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/XnPvAV]IMG_1823[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/152340683@N05/]Susan Albetski[/url], on Flickr[/IMG]


[IMG][url=https://flic.kr/p/XnPtq2][img]https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4387/36346531141_a61537fbf4.jpg[/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/XnPtq2]IMG_1825[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/152340683@N05/]Susan Albetski[/url], on Flickr[/IMG]

Lastly, would you cut off the bad side and eat the good side and peel the yellow one and use it or toss these? :?!?:

I've had similar damage to what you have there, on a few tomatoes this year. I don't know if it's thrips or stinkbugs or what, but I had an orange tomato similar to your yellow one. Lots of corking and rough skin on the top half especially. It took forever to ripen, and when it did, it tasted terrible. A later tomato from the same plant was much better tasting.

The second picture looks like some kind of growth aberration during early pollination or fruit development when the seeds are not totally enclosed by the fruit. I have seen fruit in which a crevice of dry dark fiberous material with undeveloped seeds is visible. I haven't seen one quite as large as yours. I would cut off that section, and the other half should be fine. You might as well peel the yellow and taste it before discarding.

The spots on the yellow tomato look very much like bacterial canker. Any problems with wilting foliage on that plant?

The second fruit could be catfacing or a fruit outgrowing sunscald damage.

The first picture is just environmental, rain, and direct sun exposure, unfortunately. Some varieties are more prone to this, and usually leads to magnificently thick skin. Not sure what's going on at the bottom.
Third picture is just a bad form of catfacing, those are as it's been said, the 'placenta' where the seeds were supposed to grow, but the fruit got ripped apart when small.

I have not had any pests worth mentioning other than aphids at the beginning of the season but I got my plants set out in late April and I have had more weird looking fruits with lots of mis-shapen tomatoes and scars than I have ever seen.

I have had plenty of really nice tomatoes too so I am assuming that the weird ones are due to weather affecting the pollen or some other weather related cause. It was cold, then hot, then cold, then really hot and humid, etc, etc.

This time of the year down here it is rare to find a tomato that doesn't look like that. Hot and humid will cause all kinds of skin disruptions. I haven't picked what I call a pretty tomato in a while now.

Bill

Thanks everyone. I do get an occasional Cat faced tomato, but not many, and this one was particularly weird. The yellow one had damage I had never seen before as well. At least they don't sound like damage caused by pests that I have to worry about. Thanks for the opinions.

By the way, the plants from both of these tomatoes look fine, no bacterial spec. The yello tomato was a little on the sour side but that was it. Not great, but not terrible. This is the plant that was labeled incorrectly, and I think it is Azoychka. It was the first tomato from that plant and I suspect later tomatoes will be better. Since these are early tomatoes from each plant, they may have been effected by weather early on, when the first fruits were developing.

Sue, to me your last pic looks like the tomato was eaten by a hornworm, they usually just eat the surface of the tomato, but the scar looks old so it happened some time ago. Have you had any hornworms on your tomatoes ?

I was torn between Horn worm and Cat facing, Steve. I have not seen any horn worms or any leaf damage I could attribute to them. I also have a good amount of birds, however, so I wondered if one started making a meal out of my tomato before a bird made a meal out of him. Poetic Justice in my opinion. :twisted: