Seed thief strikes again

Every year we get puzzled phone calls from strawberry growers who have fruit with missing seeds.  This fruit has formed normally and used to have intact seeds, as evidenced by the regularly formed fruit.  Then just as the fruit is near being picked, the seeds go missing. Typically the fruit looks otherwise undamaged, but it will suffer from post-harvest rots in storage.

After the fruit has formed normally and is nearly ripe, the seeds go missing.

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Two culprits can do this; birds or mice.  It’s puzzling, and typically growers don’t believe us, especially about the mice.  It’s just odd to think of the delicate little hands removing the seeds without causing damage to the berry, and without eating the fruit.  How do they do this?  Why do they do this?

A couple weeks ago Geoff mentioned that the seeds were going missing in our Lincoln variety trial, and he was putting out a trap to catch the culprit.

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