Can you survive eating the fruit of a ‘suicide’ tree, as in the HBO show ‘The White Lotus’?

By Cesareo Contreras April 8, 2025
Screen shot of a scene from Season 3 of The White Lotus. Features a woman in a blue patterned dress carrying an umbrella while a man in a pink button down hurries after her. They are surrounded by greenery.

The third season of “The White Lotus” wrapped Sunday night, capping off the popular HBO show’s most viewed season yet, which averaged about 15 million viewers per episode.   

A major point of conversation online over the past few weeks has centered on the “suicide” tree featured in the show and the poisonous fruit it produces.  

The suicide tree is very real and can be very dangerous, explains Jing-Ke Weng, a Northeastern professor of chemistry and chemical biology and the inaugural director of the Institute for Plant Human Interface, which studies the toxin made by the suicide tree plant and its relatives.

Read more from Northeastern Global News

Photograph by Stefano Delia/HBO

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