Sometimes, things that happen in nature are 100 times scarier than anything you’ve seen in the movies.  I give you the Emerald Cockroach Wasp:

If you ever see one of these buggers, run!

Looks innocent enough, right?  WRONG!  Let me tell you a little bit about the way this dude goes about his business.

1) The wasp stings a cockroach, temporarily paralyzing it.  Then it stings it again in a very, very specific place disabling a specific part of it’s brain.  I repeat, it has evolved to know just the exact place to sting, like a cockroach brain surgeon.

2) The cockroach’s brain is damaged in such away so as to leave no survival instinct – but everything else is intact (once the paralysis wears off).  That is to say, it can eat, move, etc. as it could before.

3) The wasp then chews off one of the roach’s antenna and uses it to lead the roach back to its burrow like dog on a leash.  Having no survival instinct at this point, it complacently follows.

4) The wasp lays an egg in the roach’s abdomen

Now here is where it gets truly horrifying.

5) The roach stays alive in the burrow making no attempt to escape. When the larva is hatched, it “consumes the roach’s internal organs in an order which guarantees that the roach will stay alive” until the larva is ready.  So again, this thing has evolved in such a manner that it’s young know which order to eat a roach’s organs to avoid killing it!

The part that creeps me out is the way it modifies the roach’s behavior only, leaving it capable to escape but having no desire to do so.  It kind of reminds me of The Happening, which is a super creepy movie that people didn’t like for some reason but I thought was haunting.

So what is creepier?  The Emerald Cockroach Wasp, or the fact that I recieved an email containing only that link with no explanatory text from someone?