Never-Before-Seen Footage Shows Parasitic Fly Turning Fire Ants Into Zombies

AUSTIN, TX — Just in time for Halloween, the University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences brings us a real-life horror story that could haunt your dreams: footage showing how a tiny South American fly masterfully — one might say sadistically — implants an egg in the thorax of a fire ant. And you know what happens to an egg.

But first, the setup to this real-world macabre tale from nature. The folks at the the University of Texas’ Fire Ant Project have long studied the creature that is the bane of the existence for many a farmer. Since being introduced into the U.S. in the 1930s, fire ants are now responsible for the infestation into 260 million acres in nine states, causing $1 billion annually in property damage within Texas alone, according to Texas A&M University.

Fire ants were inadvertently imported from South America beginning in the early part of the last century. According to Texas A&M researchers, the black version of the fire ant was first introduced into Mobile, Ala. in 1918, while the red version was imported accidentally in the 1930s to eventually spread and infest large swaths of the U.S.: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, according to Texas A&M research. The latter ant also has the potential of spreading west and surviving in southern Arizona and along the Pacific coast north to Washington, researchers added.

The university's study includes studying methods at controlling this prolific destroyer. Recently captured footage of the parasitoid phorid flies method of controlling the ants — turning them into virtual zombies — shows their method of eradicating the fire ant, one hapless insect at a time.

Filed at the Brackenridge Field Lab, the footage was recently aired on the PBS nature program "Supernature - Wild Flyers." It's ghoulish stuff to behold, but also fascinating. Given the fraction of a second it takes for the fly to do its thing to the fire ant, the footage has never been seen before, with technology needing to catch up to provide what amounts to a horror film.

The footage shows the complex flight maneuverings of the tiny flies as they launch their own surreptitious attack on live fire ants, ultimately rendering them into zombie-like hosts for the fly's larvae, university officials noted. It takes only a fraction of a second for the parasitoid phorid fly to land on the fire ant to inject its egg in the fly's body before fleeing the scene.

The fire ant never knows what hit it. It walks around normally for a while, performing the work that fire ants do, until the larvae starts to grow inside its head, devouring the ant from within while feasting on its brain. Understandably, this causes the now zombie ant to stray from its colony and, ultimately, die.

Once it grows, the baby fly emerges from the remains of its host ant and spreads its wings for the first time after emerging from within the ant that served as its home.

The BBC film crew capturing the images spent two weeks capturing the scenes from the field. The high-speed, high-magnification footage yields never-before-seen views to researchers showing the aerial attack.

"We have seen the sequence up close for the first time, and we will be analyzing the footage to better understand the flight dynamics and rapid decision processes needed by the flies," said Rob Plowes, research scientist at Brackenridge Field Laboratory.

Watch the entire horror show here, if you dare.

>>> Photo via WikiMedia Commons, public domain