Los Brincadores
Tags: Animals
Insects Macro Technics Tuesday, March 8th, 2005 by Davide Troise
This picture shows one famous mexican jumping bean that I’ve bought in a stall in front of the University last year. The original name is exactly “brincadores” . It is not really a bean, it just looks like one. And it jumps and vibrates because it contains a crysalis of a future-butterfly.
Here it is the way it works. A small moth lays its eggs on the flower of a shrub called the Sebastiana palmieri. After the egg hatches, the baby caterpillar buries itself in the plant’s developing seed pod. As the pod grows, it closes up around the comatose caterpillar, leaving it trapped inside. Eventually the caterpillar [a crysalis in this step] builds a tiny web, and by yanking on it he makes the pod (bean) jump. Its next stop could be Hong Kong or Atlantic City [or Rome…], wherever the jumping bean marketplace has a paying customer in need of a novelty.
This little circus act of nature takes place exactly twenty days after the first rain of the season, usually in June. The hotter it gets, the more they jump. This will continue for three to six months before the caterpillar mutates into a moth and, flying, finds freedom. (source MexicoFile)
In this macrophotography you can see the pod (on the left) with a hole by which the cocoon (on the right) was coming out. Moth leaves its cocoon breaking it on the bottom side.
