How jewel wasps give birth: Step 1, hunt down a cockroach. Step 2, inject venom directly into the roach’s brain, rendering the bugger immobile. Step 3, drag the enslaved cockroach back to your underground lair and lay eggs in its abdomen. Step 4, watch as your little children eat away at the still-living host from the inside out. Step 5, repeat.

James Cameron, eat your heart out.

The parasitic jewel wasp is the only known animal to jam its venom right into a victim's brain. The toxin does not paralyze the host; it just takes away the motivation to move. Once the roach is limp, the poor zombie can’t fight back against the wasp, nor the hungry younguns about to be feasting on its innards. This is important for the jewel wasp, because its larvae take seven to eight days of meat and warmth to mature. But a dead roach begins to rot in only one day-- so evolution taught the wasps to keep their surrogates alive and helpless.

The photo is of a new-born wasp bursting out of the now-hollow roach. Terrible! You can read more about the zombies in last month’s Journal of Experimental Biology.

(Photo: Frederic Libersat, Ben-Gurion University)