What's eating my potatoes?

Ok, so I'm in the fall of my first really large garden.  First year homesteading on acreage, so we put in a large enough garden last spring to grow potatoes as our main crop.  The deer got the tomatoes, cabbages did ok-ish, etc.  Not bad for a first year garden when everyone was busy elsewhere.

But I'm just getting to digging up my potatoes.  4 varieties.  Yukon golds had hollow heart.  Not great, but other wise they did well.  Second variety, fingerlings - well they just vanished beneath the weeds.  On to the 3rd.  Irish Cobbler, and something has been eating tiny holes in them.  They are completely underground, not being dug up and eaten.  There are no tunnels that I've found.  But a good half to 3/4 of them have holes up to the size of my thumbnail eaten out of them!

I haven't checked the Russets yet, but I'm not holding out hope that they came out unscathed.  

Has anyone else had this?  Any ideas of what could be getting into my, admittedly, small harvest?  I have seen some ants, but not a large amount.  No pillbugs.  Again, no tunnels for the groundhog that lives on the south end of the 12 acres I've got.  They haven't been dug up for deer or bunnies.

I plan on trimming up the Cobblers and just having potatoes for dinner, but I want to know what got into them so that I can plan out a way to avoid this next year.  Thanks for any help anyone can give me.

Oh, and I'm in Southwest Missouri if that helps.

Annette

In my part of the world, central England, the first answer would be keel slugs. They work underground and love potatoes.  It's rather discouraging.

I've found that the slugs are less likely to eat vividly coloured early purple potatoes (we have Vitanoire, a new potato variety that can be inky purple all through, and that likes slightly warmer conditions e.g. for me late April or early May planting for a late June / early July harvest.)

Image: Inky purple Vitanoire new potatoes in Jul 2024

Do you have any pictures? The holes from slugs are supposedly different than say a wireworm (some kind of grub).

Could be voles? Sometimes the difference between big damage and small damage in my garden is whether or not the voles thought it tasted good after the first bite.

But then again, I blame everything on voles...

Well, it looks like grubs it is then.  The land was pasture last year and I'd seen a few grubs but hadn't thought much of it.  It's too dry for slugs and I don't have voles or other tunnel making pests.  I'm off to research how to get rid of grubs now.  Thanks for everyone's input, it really helps!