Do Falling Coconuts Kill More People Than Sharks Each Year?

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This factoid has been repeated so often it might as well be true, but "research" on which it is based is a press release for a travel agency with remarkably comprehensive health insurance coverage.

Alex Kasprak

Published May 30, 2017

Image courtesy of Shutterstock Claim: More people die annually from falling coconuts than from shark attacks. Rating: Unproven

About this rating

A popular press release for a local event:

"Falling coconuts kill 150 people worldwide each year, 15 times the number of fatalities attributable to sharks," said George Burgess, Director of the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File and a noted shark researcher.

"The reality is that, on the list of potential dangers encountered in aquatic recreation, sharks are right at the bottom of the list," said Burgess, who was one of three scientists participating Tuesday in a National Sea Grant College Program and NOAA Fisheries sponsored press briefing on sharks and the risks of shark attacks at the National Press Club.

Investigating the specific claim of 150 coconut deaths each year, syndicated skeptic column The Straight Dope recipient of a 2001 Ig Nobel award for research that  "cannot or should not be replicated" — did not set out to calculate the global annual death rate from falling coconuts, however. Instead, using simple physics and four years of data collected from a remote Papua New Guinean hospital, it sought to demonstrate that the risk to human health from falling coconuts was a real one. From a physics standpoint, the paper argued:

If a coconut weighing 2 kg falls 25 meters onto a person's head, the impact velocity is 80 km/hr. The decelerating force on the head will vary depending on whether a direct or glancing blow is received. The distance in which the coconut is decelerated is also an important factor. Thus an infant's head lying on the ground would receive a much greater force than that received by the head of a standing adult, that dropped as it was struck. For a stopping distance of 5cm and a direct blow, the force would be 1,000 kg.

From a number of fatalities standpoint, however, the data did not actually directly identify a single fatality, though it did anecdotally report one death:

Nine trauma admissions resulted from falling coconuts during the 4-year study period; during this time a total of 355 trauma cases were admitted. Thus 2.5% of trauma admissions were caused by falling coconuts. Injuries were to the back, shoulders, or head. [...] The health worker who referred Patient 1 for craniotomy informed us about another person in the same village who had died instantly a few years earlier when struck on the head by a falling coconut.

While it might perhaps be possible to use this limited data to come up with a rough global estimate, no study has actually attempted to do this with systematic methodology. As such, there is no way to debunk the claim with 100 percent certainty. We can say, though, that newspaper reports of death from falling coconuts are far more sparse than reports of death from shark attacks. A 1973 article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin detailed the tragic death of a 2-year old girl struck by a large number of falling coconuts on a beach, while claiming that as far as they could tell, this was the first newspaper report of such an incident in the area:

 

[caption id="attachment_92449" align="aligncenter" width="600"]

 Honolulu Star-Bulletin. 28 July 1973. Credit: Newspapers.com[/caption]

The fact that this 1973 story has been cited decades after the fact (for example from a 1999 edition of the Honolulu Advertiser below), at least superficially reinforces the notion that death from falling coconut is a rare (but real) occurrence:

 

[caption id="attachment_92450" align="aligncenter" width="600"]

 The Honolulu Advertiser. 14 January 1997. Credit: Newspapers.com[/caption]

We rank this as unproven because accurate, published estimates on the global annual rate of death from falling coconut do not yet exist. Given the dearth of firsthand accounts of death from falling coconut, however, it seems unlikely that they pose more of a threat to human health than do sharks — even if death from either event is extremely unlikely.

Sources

Turnbull, Leslie.   "How to Avoid Being Eaten by a Shark."     This Week.   29 May 2017.

Florida Museum.   "International Shark Attack File"     Accessed 30 May 2017.

UniSci.   "Falling Coconuts Kill More People Than Shark Attacks."     Accessed 30 May 2017.

Barss, Peter.   "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts."     Journal of Trauma.   November 1984.

Improbable Research.   "Portrait of an Ig Winner: Dr. Barss."     Accessed 30 May 2017.

Honolulu Star-Bulletin.   "Baby Dies After Being Hit by Falling Cluster of Coconuts."     28 July 1973.

The Honolulu Advertiser.   "Coconut Danger in Park."     14 January 1997.

By Alex Kasprak

Alex Kasprak is an investigative journalist and science writer reporting on scientific misinformation, online fraud, and financial crime.

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