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Speaker 1: Brain with today's question, how do Mexican jumping beans work?
Speaker 1: When I was a kid growing up in southern California,
Speaker 1: my father used to take us to the seven eleven
Speaker 1: on the corner for slurpeas and gum. There was usually
Speaker 1: a display on the counter that held little, clear plastic
Speaker 1: boxes of four or five Mexican jumping beans. You could
Speaker 1: hear the display rattle is the beans clicked against the
Speaker 1: plastic boxes. We would buy them and play games with
Speaker 1: them on the kitchen table. Mexican jumping beans are very real,
Speaker 1: but the Mexican jumping beans that you see in many
Speaker 1: cartoons are not real. Mexican jumping beans are small, about
Speaker 1: the size of a kernel of corn or small bean.
Speaker 1: They do not wear sombreros. They do not jump into
Speaker 1: the air. They rock, or, on occasion, scoot a millimeter
Speaker 1: or two. Imagine a kernel of corn that moves a
Speaker 1: millimeter in one direction every fifteen seconds or so. That's
Speaker 1: about as exciting as jumping beans get. The thing that
Speaker 1: makes these beans jump is a tiny moth larva that
Speaker 1: lives inside the bean. The moth lays its eggs in
Speaker 1: the flower of the plant, and the eggs are incorporated
Speaker 1: into the seeds. The larva then eat out the interior
Speaker 1: of the bean and live there. When the larva move,
Speaker 1: so does the bean. Eventually, the larva turn into moths
Speaker 1: that emerge from the beans to repeat the cycle. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
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