Good morning, John.

I continue to be impressed by the particular period of time you decided to take off from making videos 'cause it's been–it's been a–it's been a lot. But, for my own personal mental health, I simply am not going to make another big, interesting, thoughtful video, so get ready for Hank Green's Top Seven Best Coconut Tree Facts.

#1: The fact that coconuts kill 150 people per year, which is more than sharks, has been widely reported as part of communications about how rare shark attacks are. Now, shark attacks are rare, but this fact is definitely incorrect. The coconut death thing appears to be poorly extrapolated from one bit of research that studied coconut related injuries in one country. When you actually look at reports of coconut-related fatalities, between zero and two people are killed every year by a falling coconut, which is a lot. But it is less than the roughly 10 people per year that are killed in unprovoked shark attacks. Also, one of the people recently killed by a coconut was kinda killed by a lot of coconuts as during an earthquake, the tree over his house dropped a bunch of coconuts which were able to penetrate the roof of his house and kill him, so he was kinda killed by a coconut and kinda killed by an earthquake.

#2: Coconuts floating on the open ocean rely on storms to get pushed along with other debris beyond normal tidal areas and onto some area where they can get stuck. Without storms, coconuts would not be an effective seed dispersal mechanism. This is kinda extra cool because while big storms can destroy coconut trees, they are necessary for the continued existence of all coconut trees.

#3: Coconut trees are not trees and coconuts are not cocoa or nuts. I mean coconut trees are kind of trees in that, like, if you look at it, you're like, "That's a tree." Then–then that's a tree I guess, but they don't, like, share a common ancestor with oak trees. Trees is kinda just like a made-up classification. It's like a worm, it's a thing that looks like that. Now the word cocoa, like hot cocoa, like chocolate, comes from an indigenous word that sounds something like cacao. But it was linguistically corrupted into cocoa probably due to the influence from coco—the Spanish word for coconut. In English, we added a nut onto the end of coco because that seemed like a good fun thing to do, and frankly I agree. But if you're looking for like a harsh physiological grouping of what a coconut is, it's a drupe—which is just the word for a fruit that contains a single seed. So it's like a dry drupe. Though actually, just like tree, the definition of nut is pretty wishy-washy, so you could probably actually make the case that a coconut is a nut. So I guess, I've gone back on my fact a coconut tree is a nut tree kind of.

#5: And this absolutely shocked me, coconuts very associated with sort of Caribbean life are not native to the Caribbean. We're not like 100% sure where they first evolved but before people started moving them around because they were a good source of fresh water on long voyages and also they were delicious, they were probably isolated to Southeast Asia Indonesia region with maybe some in Australia and some over on, like, the southern part of India. And it seems like they first started to spread beyond that area along with Polynesians. Now, you'd think that they could just float over the whole world, right? Coconuts float. They're a floating seed. But coconuts actually don't stay viable for that long when floating on the ocean. They needed us to help them take over their current range, which is now circumequatorial, including of course in the Caribbean

#6: While coconuts might be unlikely to kill you by falling on you, they could kill you if you drank too much coconut water. It has enough potassium that a very very large dose could make your heart start beating weird, and if you don't get help you could die. Now we're talking a lot here. This case study is a guy who drank 11 coconut waters, which–that seems like a bad financial choice. Also, we should say that while this guy's condition was life-threatening, he did not die. But this is one reason why giving coconut water as intravenous fluid for dehydration—which has long been claimed as like a fun coconut fact—probably isn't a great idea.

And finally, #7: This is a fossilized coconut from an early species of coconut tree and it is the size of a strawberry.

John, what a wonderful and weird world we get to inhabit. I'll see you in August