Preposterous. A five ounce bird cannot carry a one pound coconut.
What if the swallows had a bit of creeper?
Hey, when a slow pitch like that comes along, you gotta swing for the fences! 
If I didn’t make that joke, I’d have my SmartAss card revoked.
I hear there might be a Monty Python sketch on this very subject. I am looking for it.
And, it was posed to me that coconuts have hair and milk, they could be mammals.
and palms!
I may be being wooshed, but you should be thinking less ‘sketch’ and more ‘theatrical movie’.
No whoosh. Havn’t watched much Python. Which movie?
What? Held under the dorsal guiding feathers?
Aw Beck, you were coming along so nicely, too.
From Monty Python and The Holy Grail
A lot of people have never seen the actual fruit of a coconut-palm, just the “defleshed” seed that we call a coconut. I mean, it’s fairly standard in comics and illustrations to draw palms with the brown coconuts growing on them, despite that not being reality.
Still, with the high fat content I expect a coconut floats pretty well, if not as well as
Here’s a picture of a fruit sprouting on a Hawaii beach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut#/media/File:Coconut_germinating_on_Black_Sand_Beach,_Island_of_Hawaii.JPG
And although dispersal by water is how the palm spreads naturally, there is some debate about how much of it’s range is accounted for by that, and how much is due to transport by sea faring humans.
Then there was that documentary about a guy who escaped Devil’s Island on a raft of coconuts netted together.
Nobody’s perfect. I will check it out.
I’m glad you found your answer, but your cursory Google searching skills could definitely use some work! I threw in “Coconuts spread islands by floating” and literally the first 4 results were all about your question.
I hate to have to break this to you, but how do you think monkeys got to the Americas? Africa and South America were once joined, but the monkeys migrate from Africa long after the two continents split apart.
Oh, btw… coconuts float.
I wondered about that continent shifting/splitting thing. We were out to dinner when the search happened. So, yea it was a bit anemic. We forgot about it til I posted the question. I thought it was interesting. I have read more aboit it today.
If you have Netflix, there is a BBC documentary called “South Pacific” that goes into this. You also get the bonus of hearing Benedict Cumberbatch mispronounce penguins. Like, every time he says it.
Both people answered the question.
Under natural conditions, coconut palms are not found away from the immediate area of an ocean beach. They are highly adapted to spread between islands and along coasts by floating. Since the heavy seeds fall directly under the tree, they can’t spread inland or uphill very easily.
Basically, any coconut tree any distance from the shore has been planted there by humans (or is descended from one planted there earlier).
I will be looking for that. Loves me some BC! Thx.
The coco de mer is large double coconut which looks rather like human buttocks. It was known for centuries from individual nuts floating on the ocean or washed up on beaches, long before the rare tree that it grows on was widely known. Ironically, the coco de mer does not spread by floating on water since, unlike most coconuts, it normally sinks, but after the husk rots off and the nut begins to decay after lying on the ocean floor a long time, it may float to the surface. This led to numerous legends about “underwater trees” and other origin stories about this mysterious nut.