%0 Journal Article
%T The dangerous life of coconuts
%J Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment - Wiley Online Library
%D 2019
%R https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2094
%X It was on a little beach outside Padang Bai in eastern Bali that I first saw a coconut finish its seaborne journey, rolling up with the waves onto the sand. Over the centuries, countless other coconuts have done the same thing around the tropics, and countless other people have no doubt done what I did with mine: pick it up and half©\bury it in the warm ground where the beach meets the first vegetation. It would, I hoped, sprout and grow, the many hazards it had faced now overcome. For the coconut days of a potential Cocos nucifera palm are fraught with danger. These trees may be specialists in dispersing their one©\seeded drupes by drifting them off on ocean currents, but life on the high seas is an unpredictable business; every floating coconut faces the possibility of not ending up in the right kind of place. Some coconuts may never see land again, eventually sinking beneath the waves. Some may end up on rocky shores where they are unable to successfully germinate. And others may wind up in places where the climate would prevent germination. From time to time, for instance, coconuts from the eastern Americas wash up on the beaches of northwestern Europe, where they could never grow. It's all a bit hit and miss when you are a rudderless vessel. There are other dangers too, like encounters with coconut©\eating whales. Six sperm whales have been captured north of the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea, each with a coconut in its stomach (www.icrwhale.org/pdf/SC01783-91.pdf). The recorders of this bizarre information suggest that since the coconuts¡¯ outer coatings were ¡°not so fresh¡±, they may have floated up from the tropics before being gobbled up from the ocean's surface. Admittedly, it is hard to picture a sperm whale leaping to pluck a coconut from a tree. There have been other such recordings too. During the 1964¨C65 whaling season, another sperm whale was captured off the coast of New Zealand, this time with a much fresher coconut in its stomach, ¡°still in its husk and not waterlogged¡± (NZ J Mar Freshwat Res 1967; 1: 156¨C79). Since the reporters of this incident also remain silent on the possibility of arboreally feeding cetaceans, one is left to assume that some sperm whales do occasionally consume a floating coconut. However, since squid are generally more to their liking, it is improbable that they swallow them for their food value. Going by the rocks, glass buoys, and other paraphernalia that have been found in their stomachs, they may take them on board to serve as gastroliths. Whatever the reason, this is bad news for coconuts, although they may
%U https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fee.2094