Last year DISCOVER brought you the gallery "Zombie Animals and the Parasites That Control Them," but we missed one: Fire ants have a South American nemesis, the phorid fly, that takes over a fire ant's mind. After the female lays its eggs inside the ant's body, the larvae move to the ant's head and force it to move away from the nest.

After a while, the larvae hatch, thereby decapitating the ant.

Because the flies inflict this fate only on invasive fire ants and not other ant species, Texas officials have begun releasing phorids in the hopes of slowing down the fire ant spread.