The Wells: A Double-Pawpaw Machine

Each pawpaw fruit is born from a flower that has the potential to produce up to about eight fruit at a time, so you'll often see pawpaws growing in clusters. Sometimes the clusters have complications. As they grow in close quarters from the same flower, one fruit might adhere to another fruit, and then the fruit to which it adheres will out pace it in growth, breaking the smaller fruit off of the stem and leaving it like a parasite, hanging onto the larger fruit and then shriveling up eventually. You can see this is what happened with the big pawpaw in the foreground here. The brown nub on top is the smaller fruit in the scenario I've just described.

A closer look at the little failed pawpaw that we had going on during pawpaw season of 2017. In 2016 I described little pawpaws like these as parasitic twins. 

But there's another scenario that can play out when pawpaws from the same flower adhere to each other, as long as the two adhering pawpaws can roughly match each others' growth:
the double-pawpaw.
Above, you see the cluster and the two lower pawpaws have stuck together from infancy and stayed together as they've grown. Before pawpaw season of 2017, I had only seen this type of thing in a pic I saw once online (I've just searched and can't find it now). But during the 2017 season, we were surprised to see the Wells cultivar produce probably five sets of double-pawpaws.
Neither the KSU-Atwood nor the Shenandoah produced any doubles.

A closer look: you can see they really are stuck together.

Here's another set of doubles. Based on the shape, I thought of this one as Asimina triloba's straining toward Taoist philosophy.

Another double-pawpaw that hadn't yet attained a consciousness of how seemingly contradictory forces may actually be complementary.

Here I am, having harvested a big cluster of three Wells pawpaws. The two that are directly in my hand are doubles.

See?

Here's what the connective tissue looks like on a double-pawpaw.

One day I harvested both the yin-yang pawpaw and a double-pawpaw that was quite off balance, to the point that if the smaller one were just a little smaller I bet it would have become a parasitic twin.

Here's the yin-yang double-pawpaw getting its portrait on the counter.

Here's the same double-pawpaw cut open.

The Wells produced so many double-pawpaws in 2017. I wonder if it was a fluke or if this is something we can expect from it every year?