Why mexican jumping beans jump

And then transforms into an adult moth. It simply pushes itself through the pre-cut exit door — which is handy, because now its mandibles are gone. The liberated moth has mere days, maybe a few weeks, to quickly mate and lay eggs before it dies.

Giving birth. A female tsetse fly pushes out a single squiggly larva almost as big as herself, which she nourishes with her own milk. That's right: fly milk. Enjoy and see you soon. Search-Icon Created with Sketch. KQED is a proud member of. Always free. Twitter Instagram. Primary Menu. Search for: Search. Why does the Mexican jumping bean jump? Watch more with these video collections:. Rion Nakaya December 7, December 7, This giant plant looks like raw meat and smells like dead rat Rion Nakaya January 23, June 28, Why are Glasswing Butterfly wings clear?

For hundreds of years, people living near tamboti trees have put the stuff on darts for hunting large game. Even a sprinkle of crushed-up tamboti bark can make a stream full of fish go belly-up—like a chemical grenade. In Mexico, traditional hunters and fishermen employed the same strategies with the sap of Sebastiania bilocularis , a lesser-known species of tree that also produces jumping beans.

According to Adrian Burton , who wrote about jumping beans for an article last year in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment , the trees can be so toxic that locals avoid using them for firewood. The smoke taints food and causes eye irritation. As Winterboer tells it, a friend of his once cracked a tooth while he was on an expedition. The pain was so great, and the friend so desperate, that he allowed the local guides to apply a bit of tamboti sap to the exposed cavity in his tooth.

Like liquid flame, the sap burned the nerve out, effectively achieving the same result as a root canal. How exactly moth larvae cope with such a seriously lethal habitat has not been studied. Perhaps setting up in a tree with poison blood affords the little guys some sort of protection from predators. According to Peter Oboyski , collections manager for the Essig Museum of Entomology at the University of California—Berkeley, there are species of parasitic wasps that descend upon moth larvae in their seedpod homes, inject their spawn into the beans with alien-like ovipositors, and fly away.

The wasp eggs eventually hatch and start doing what parasitic wasp larvae do—eating their hosts alive. Oh, parasitic wasps , I love you so. We know a little more about one species of hopping wasp in particular, Bathyplectes anurus , thanks to a study published in December in a journal called Science of Nature. Thank you. Photos may not be used on commercial sites except this one!!. The cyber eye is watching! Pupa Stage. This is the stage within the bean the worm begins metamorphosis.

Empty pupa case. The adult moth emerges from the case after completing metamorphosis. A full grown adult Jumping Bean Moth.