The Durian. It's known as the King of Fruits due to its pungent smell and divisive taste.

But what makes the durian iconic apart from its unbearable stench and unique taste is its appearance.

It's (usually) covered entirely with thorns!

The durian as we know it.

That was until recently.

Indonesia recently dropped a bombshell (or shall we call it a durian shell?).

According to Mongabay Indonesia, its agricultural officials revealed that they've succeeded in growing a durian tree that bears thornless fruits.

Shaped like a melon and being noticeably smooth, the thorns on this durians are extremely unnoticeable.

If you had trouble cutting open its thorny cousins, this fella is extremely easy to open.

“Alhamdulillah, I’m relieved. People can’t call (bald durians) a hoax any more,” Maisin, West Nusa Tenggara province's head of seed inspection and certification said to Mongabay.

A game changer.

According to Maisin, the flesh of the thornless durian is a lot more thinner and tastes much more sweeter.

If this is indeed true, Indonesia has just created a game changer: A durian that is sweeter and much easier to cut open.

But it was no easy task for Indonesia's agricultural team to create these durians.



The creation process of the thornless durian variant began in 2007 in Trenggaluh Village near Mount Rinjani. The local agricultural team took grafts from a durian tree that had sprouted a bald variant of the fruit.

The owner of the tree, a family, was suspicious of the fruit to the point that they thought the durian was poisonous.

However, curiosity got the better of the owner's son who decided to try the durian out. Turns out, the fruit tasted exactly like its regular cousin.

The seeds of these durians were used to cultivate more such versions.

12 years in the making.

According to Maisin, only two percent of the seeds blossomed and they've been named Durian Gundul.

Based on observation, these unique variant are believed to be a result of a recessive gene of the female and male flowers that tend to grow when they're close to each other.

So from the 40 grafts, Indonesia's agricultural team managed to cultivate a whopping 23,000 seedlings. These seedlings were sent to other agricultural centres to be planted.

But this is not the first.

Way back in the 1950s, the Philippines had been successful in creating a thornless durian variant in the Compostela Valley east of Davao City.

Philippine President Diosdado P Macapagal himself had planted some of these trees in 1964. Unfortunately, many of them didn't taste good, according to FORMAT.

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Cover image sourced from Mongabay Indonesia.