I’ve seen the meme, so you’ve seen the meme, so someone had to fact check the meme.
Today’s Moment of Science… Yes. I am suggesting coconuts migrate, but they had some help.
So. Hollow fatty sacks of electrolytes. And how they carried coconuts around the world.
It’s fun poking around interviews and research papers that coyly suggest these hairy balls drifted through the world on ocean currents, seeding themselves as the waves saw fit.
If only prehistoric botany was so easily picked up via reddit and Monty Python.
It’s fucking rubbish. Even the papers that suggest it’s possible don’t even claim they have proof it happened. At best, one paper is regularly cited as evidence that a coconut can float in seawater for 110 days.
I was curious what that sole paper– from 1941– had to say.
To be fair, the article was “concerned only with the viability of the coconut seed” after marinating in the ocean for a while. They bathed fifteen coconuts for up to four months in sea water. Ten of them were able to develop into healthy plants in a tropical garden in Honolulu (the data was lost for one of them but it’s counted as a grower, so). The other five, not so much. The study did go on to describe an additional two attempted plantings involving a total of fifty heavily basted nuts. Confidence inspiringly, they didn’t give full details, so I’m gonna say the results were mixed.
I’m sure they would have just looked at the DNA in 1941 but they were too lazy back then, idk.
One jackass named Hugh Harries has taken this dream of free coconut migration and fucking run with it. Back in the late 1970s he wrote a girthy piece on coconuts. Part of his rationale for “accepting uncritically” the 1941 paper? A bunch of other people did, so that’s science. Unfortunately lacking in depth though, Harries has kept doubling down on these claims despite taking an utter pounding of new information.
A 2011 study examining the genetics of over 1,300 coconuts shed some light onto this buttered waterlogged mystery. Previous attempts to trace the lineage of these fuzzy meatsacks relied on visual characteristics. However, their DNA suggests there were two main cultivation groups: the Pacific ocean and Indian Ocean coconuts. Including other clues like linguistics and migratory patterns, it seems most likely that the coconut originated in Southeast Asia and went on an adventure with Neolithic era Austronesians.
As for the rumors about coconuts getting to the Americas from simply floating across the Pacific? If they floated there, they did it in boats. In Panama the fruit was unambiguously described in pre-Columbian literature. Their genetics point towards one origin (suspected to be the Philippines). We’d see a diversity of coconut genetics from thousands of years of palm trees dropping their endosperm all over the beaches before they set themselves adrift, if that was a thing that happened.
Sure, it’s possible that some coconuts floated between a few small islands in the Pacific that aren’t too far apart. But a meme suggesting they arrived in the Caribbean from Asia? No swallow, unladen or otherwise, would dare.
This has been your Moment of Science, having the strangest craving for a piña colada.
To support my noble quest to fact check every corner of the internet, even the porn and the memes, head to patreon.com/scibabe.
Join the discussion!