Existing MANET routing protocols may not be efficient for mobile sensor networks (MSNs) since they generate too much control traffic by relying on flooding or route maintenance messages. Furthermore, peer-to-peer communication patterns assumed in MANET would exacerbate the traffic around sink nodes in MSNs. In this paper we propose traffic adaptive routing (TAR) for MSNs; it can reduce the control packets by analyzing and predicting the source, volume, and the patterns of both traffic and mobility. Through its analysis and the prediction of mobility, TAR also copes with dynamic topology changes by carrying out a fast route recovery process. Our theoretical analysis shows that TAR can effectively reduce unnecessary control packet flooding by 53% on average when compared to AODV. We implement TAR on NS-2. Our experimental evaluation confirms that TAR can not only improve the network and energy performance for MSNs but also can be a practical routing solution for MANET and WSNs compared to the existing ad hoc routing protocols.