Death by Coconut

A lot of people die from falling coconuts.

It sounds funny, but it's easy to understand why, coconuts are very hard and quite heavy, they can weigh up to 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds) and the coconut tree grows up to 30 meters (100 ft) tall. With a bit of physics we can find out an object falling from 30 meters high can hit the ground at up to 87 km/h or 54 mph. Imagine that landing on your head.

The poet Frederick Seidel wrote a poem titled "Coconut" that follows:

A coconut can fall and hit you on the head,
And if it falls from high enough can kind of knock you dead
Dead beneath the coconut palms, that's the life for me!

Exactly how many people die by coconut each year isn't actually too closely tracked, but it's claimed to be at 150 deaths worldwide each year. By comparison there's only about 5-10 deaths from sharks each year. Making coconuts over 15x more dangerous than sharks. It sounds impressive, but sharks are really quite harmless on the larger scale of things.