Colin Donihue

I really wish I had had my video camera for this. I was out in the field the other day, surveying lizards on a terrace, with the sun blazing overhead. As I walked through a field in front of one of my terraces I heard a popping sound – just like popping popcorn. I thought nothing of it, but then heard another, and another. As I continued walking through the field I began getting pelted by hard lima-bean sized peas explosively dispersing from their parent plants. It turns out the pods to this plant, I still don’t know its name, slowly dry and twist in the sunlight, until finally the pod bursts scattering the 3 or 4 seeds in the pod some 5 to 10 feet! Some of them were really rocketing out of there!