Jack Threads is the online shopping destination for dudes. Everything on the side is up to eight off. All styles are curated, so buyer's remorse just doesn't happen. What's more, as if you were brain stuff, you can skip the membership wait list and get instant access at jack threads dot com slash stuff. Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com where smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, how do Mexican jumping beans work?
When I was a kid growing up in southern California, my father used to take us to the seven eleven on the corner for slurpeas and gum. There was usually a display on the counter that held little, clear plastic boxes of four or five Mexican jumping beans. You could hear the display rattle is the beans clicked against the plastic boxes. We would buy them and play games with them on the kitchen table. Mexican jumping beans are very real, but the Mexican jumping beans that you see in many
cartoons are not real. Mexican jumping beans are small, about the size of a kernel of corn or small bean. They do not wear sombreros. They do not jump into the air. They rock, or, on occasion, scoot a millimeter or two. Imagine a kernel of corn that moves a millimeter in one direction every fifteen seconds or so. That's about as exciting as jumping beans get. The thing that makes these beans jump is a tiny moth larva that
lives inside the bean. The moth lays its eggs in the flower of the plant, and the eggs are incorporated into the seeds. The larva then eat out the interior of the bean and live there. When the larva move, so does the bean. Eventually, the larva turn into moths that emerge from the beans to repeat the cycle. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. Audible dot com is the leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment.
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