News Animals

Jumping beans’ random strategy always leads to shade — eventually

Random jumps aren’t fast, but they’re guaranteed to get jumping beans out of the sun

A photo of a jumping bean moth resting on a seed pod.

A jumping bean moth rests on a seed pod that was once its home where, as a larva, it relied on random hops to beat the heat.

AuldAlliance/English Wikipedia

By James R. Riordon

Given enough time, jumping beans will always find their way out of the sun.

Jumping beans, which are really seed pods with twitchy moth larvae inside, hop around in a way that — if they live long enough — is guaranteed to eventually land them in the shade, researchers report in a study to appear in January in Physical Review E.