Getting zapped with millions of volts of electricity may not sound like a healthy activity, but for some trees, it is. A new study, published in New Phytologist, reports that some tropical tree species are not only able to tolerate lightning strikes, but benefit from them. The trees may have even evolved to act as lightning rods.

Lightning kills hundreds of millions of trees per year. But in 2015, while working in Panama, Gora and his colleagues came across a Dipteryx oleifera tree that had survived a strike with little damage—even though the jolt had been strong enough to blast a parasitic vine out of its crown and kill more than a dozen neighboring trees.

Scientists had previously suspected that some trees evolved to tolerate lightning, but evidence to back it up was lacking. In 2022, Gora and colleagues demonstrated for the first time that trees differ in their ability to survive getting hit by lightning.