From my understanding a lot of fruit trees produce fruits to allow other animals to eat them poop seeds and make new trees. Trees that don’t do this often have a butter or poor yeild to shy away from this. What is the coconut palm tree’s benefit in producing coconuts?
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Plants have many different strategies for spreading thier seeds. Animals, wind, explosions, and in this case, water. Coconuts float! This lets the plant propagate to other nearby tropical islands.
Not all fruits are meant to be eaten for distribution. In many cases the fruit of a plant is meant to provide nutrition for the seedling to grow from, not entice consumption by animals. Coconuts spread quite a bit over water by floating. This allows them to spread over extremely wide areas. They also don’t need to move very far from the parent plant (palm trees don’t spread branches to block sunlight for yards around). So there isn’t a real need for animal spread.
I suppose they could also be carried by birds, but I hear there is a lot of debate as to how a bird might grip it or problems regarding weight ratios.
The coconut can float. And since it wont be eaten it is more likely to reach the ocean. Through the ocean it can reach new islands and grow there. There usually is no animal that could carry a tree fruit that far, so the coconut got creative
They float many miles and remain viable for many months. Makes proliferating vast open water much more likely
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