A grown coconut palm can be 30 metres tall, and a ripe coconut can weigh more than a kilogram. When one falls, it hits the ground at around 80 kilometres per hour. That is fast enough to dent a car roof, which is why estimates suggest falling coconuts injure many more people each year than shark attacks do.
Coconut palms grow on beaches because their fruit is actually a brilliant boat. The thick fibrous husk floats, the inner shell is waterproof, and the milky water inside keeps the seed alive for months. A coconut can drift across an entire ocean and still sprout into a new tree when it washes up.
That is how coconut palms spread to nearly every tropical island on Earth long before humans started planting them. The “coco” in coconut comes from an old Portuguese word meaning “grinning face” - sailors thought the three little marks on the shell looked like eyes and a mouth.
