A fly lays an egg inside an unsuspecting victim walking in the woods on a sunny day. Soon the egg matures and moves into the head of its prey, taking bodily control before turning the prey into a ...

FORT WORTH, Texas — It sounds like something out of science fiction: zombie fire ants. But it's all too real. Fire ants wander aimlessly away from the mound. Eventually their heads fall off, and they ...

Imagine coming-to, jaws gripping the top of a swaying blade of grass, unaware of how you got there. That's the reality for ants infected with the lancet liver fluke, a tiny parasitic flatworm. Liver ...

Around the world, a parasitic fungus transforms ants into "zombies." The fungus is like something out of a horror movie: The organism hijacks the body and brain of its ant host, mind-controlling it ...

Hijacking the body of a convenient host is nothing new in the opportunistic world of parasitism. Nor are zombie ants, thanks to the fittingly named zombie-ant fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis), ...

FORT WORTH, Texas — Researchers in Texas are trying an unusual approach to combat fire ants: deploying parasitic flies that turn the pesky and economically costly insects into zombies whose heads fall ...

They say reality is stranger than fiction. With Halloween just around the corner, we wanted to explore the creepier side of ...

In the dense forests of South America and Southeast Asia, a parasite operates with chilling precision. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, often called the zombie-ant fungus, infects ants, invades their ...

A zombie cicada fungus, _Massospora cicadina_, has consumed the rear end of this periodical cicada, replacing it with a 'plug' of chalky spores. Matt Kasson, CC BY-ND Is a zombie apocalypse caused by ...