This story really gives me the heeby jeebies.  I don’t like wasps in general, but one species in particular has a penchant for performing brain surgery on roaches.

When Ampulex compressa is ready to lay eggs, she finds a suitable roach and quickly paralyzes it with venom.  Then she inserts her stinger into the roach’s brain and injects venom at a specific site to alter the neurons there, draining the roach’s will to resist and lowering it’s metabolism so it can live for weeks without eating.  The wasp grasps the zombie roach’s antenna and leads it to her nest, then lays an egg on it’s belly.  The larvae hatches, chews it’s way through the roach’s exoskeleton and eats the roach alive until the larvae becomes a wasp.

Of course, the roach becomes a zombie in the voodoo sense rather than the horror movie sense, but it’s still creepy to know there are insects which have evolved to hijack another insect’s brain.

Scientists are trying to duplicate the wasp’s sting, presumably to build an army of militarized roach coaches with controllable, zombified drivers, but their unholy creations can only live for about six days.  They’re already running behind Japanese scientists who have developed a way to control roaches electronically.  To get a leg up, they should try priming the roaches for the zombie lifestyle by making them watch insect TV.

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