Coco Loco

The coconut isn’t actually a nut, but the stone from a type of fruit known as a drupe. Collectively, we eat a lot of drupes. Nectarines, mangoes and olives spring to mind. Yet the coconut is one of only a very few whose seeds are more desirable than their fruit. Not that eating that seed all that easy easy to do. You usually need either a saw, a power drill or a machete to break into one.

The toughness of the coconut is what’s thought to be behind it’s extraordinary dispersion among islands in the South Pacific. Coconut trees are highly tolerant of salt water, and their shallow roots prefer beach sand. Combine those adaptations with tough fruit that floats like a football and high productivity (some coconut trees can produce 75 fruits a year), and you have one of nature’s most effective seed dispersal machines. Fruit that drops off the tree into the surf (or gets carried out by the tide) can float for months at sea and still take root when it washes up on a distant beach. Caribbean coconuts have been found as far away as Norway, still capable of germinating.

All that toughness makes them a bit dangerous too. When you consider that a coconut tree can grow up to 80 feet or more in height and a decent-sized coconut can weigh between four and five pounds, they have some real injury-causing potential. A 4 1/2 pound coconut dropped from 80 feet is traveling in excess of 250 miles per hour by the time it hits the ground, and strikes with a force of just under 2,500 pounds per square inch. Ouch. Fortunately, human heads are pretty tough things themselves (especially among us thick-skulled pastry types). For that reason, death by coconut is rare, far rarer than the 150-per-year statistic Florida state officials once bantered about to make people feel better about shark attacks. Hey, ten times more people die from coconut impacts than shark bites every year, folks. Ah, but then coconuts don’t rip your limbs off when you get too close to them, do they governor? That was always my problem with those press conferences.

Still, it’s true that concussions from coconuts aren’t at all rare in coconut cultivation locales like the Dominican Republic. No wonder people there associate coconuts with madness. Me, I think I’d wear a football helmet everywhere I went.