Having lived many years on the windward coast of a tropical island I have seen several coconuts, and a couple of trees, wash up during storms. Not hard to imagine that at least some of the coconuts could wash high enough up the beach and be covered by enough sand so as to be able to sprout nicely. And so many other drift seeds would wash up that beachcombers could easily find them.
I remain stunned that this thread wasn’t started by watching The Holy Grail. I’m amazed that coconut migration could possibly come up separate from that movie. The world is a strange place.
Here he is on Graham Norton, gamely taking his lumps (penguin talk starts at 3:28): “pengwings”
I imagine that’s going to be one of those things where the actual success rate never actually tails right off to zero - variables such as a favourable current, a slightly more durable coconut, etc can probably collide in such way to produce some extraordinary outliers.
It did occur to me that the presence of coconuts somewhat inland could be due to flooding from storms or tsunamis. They would still would not be found much higher than sea level though.
I didn’t specify exactly what “any distance” was, and none of the items in that cache are coconuts capable of germination. Big as they are, coconut crabs don’t drag coconuts long distances inland.
But I’ll concede that a coconut could occasionally be dragged a short distance inland by an animal such as a coconut crab or a monkey. Let’s just say that in general coconut trees found inland didn’t originate from nuts dropped near that spot by another tree.
And swallows, right?
African or European swallows?
I read a really interesting journal in a book called ‘Plant Hunting for Kew’ about some botanists who went off in search of a forest species of coconut which was found inland and in mountainous areas - the fruits were considerably smaller than coastal coconut species, but still too large to be carried uphill by any of the native fauna of the region - they hypothesised that the current distribution of the plant must have been shaped by a now-extinct large bird (elephant bird or something like that)
Not if the monkey carries it in it’s mouth & then forcibly ejects it?