Everybody

loves the zombie wasps. It's the Emerald Jewel wasp. She's very beautiful. She's very glossy. She's kind of iridescent. She's also quite small. She is a stinging wasp and she's solitary. She lives on her own. So she hunts cockroaches. Cockroaches tend to be quite big. She's got the problem that she's got to find the cockroach. That's the easy bit. The second problem is she's got to paralyze the cockroach. Well, that's kind of all right. She can do that. The third problem is she's got to get the cockroach to the burrow that she's prepared her nest. And the cockroach is very big. Her evolution has provided her with a solution is this. She has two very precise things. So one is in the thorax, which is the main body of the cockroach, which stops it squirming around such that it's still enough that she can then inject right into its brain with a neurotoxin, which renders the cockroach still able to walk but has no will. And so then what she does is she grabs it by, I'm not actually, this isn't going to be very good for the wasp. What do you mean it's so

cute? She must have been crazy.

It's very, very hard to know anywhere. She grabs the semi-paralysed

cockroach by its antenna and she walks it like a poodle to its underground tomb and it burrows itself basically in the tomb and then she lays her egg on it and seals it up. And then that cockroach is paralyzed but remains a beautifully fresh living larder because it's still alive and also the wasp has put all these sort of antibiotics and bacterial stuff in with it as well. And then the egg hatches into the larvae and you know the story. The larvae eat the cockroach from the inside, well, carries on eating it. And it's a beautiful story. Everybody loves the zombie. Yeah, yeah, give the zombie one. Sorry, there's an even better one though. There is this wasp. It's a spider hunting wasp. It doesn't build an nest, so it's quite unusual for a hunting wasp, solitary hunting wasp. It lays its egg on this spider called homolytus and the spider is oblivious and it goes about its business with this wasp egg on its bottom and then the egg hatches into a larvae and proceeds to eat the spider from the rear forwards, only eating the bits that are just not necessary, so the bits of chitin and bits of fat and bits of muscle. And meanwhile the spider is carrying on its daily business, oblivious to the fact that its dairy air is being nibbled up by a wasp plava. And it carries on eating until it's big enough to pupate and only at that point, so the last thing is to eat the vital organs. And at that point when it's ready to pupate, the spider finally keels over and dies and all that's left of it is all its mandibles.

Finally to the fungi, or fungi, is it fungi or fungi? Either. Okay, finally to the fungi fungi. Merlin Shelldrake, mushroom expert and author of the hugely successful entangled life told us how certain fungi or fungi both hunt and become hangmen for the nematode worm. Nematode. Is it nematode word?

There are fungi that do hunt animals in a way that in more familiar kind of predation to us and they nematode worms and there's lots of different ways to hunt nematode worms. This is an ability that has evolved independently in different parts of the fungal lineage. Some are able to, they eavesdrop on nematode life by being sensitive to chemicals that nematodes produce to do basic things like reproduce and communicate with each other.