The praying mantis is usually the predator—quiet, focused, and deadly. But even this insect isn’t safe from a bizarre twist of nature: a parasite called the horsehair worm. It’s a strange little creature that can actually take control of the mantis’s mind. Horsehair worms start in water, where their eggs hatch into tiny larvae. Small insects, like crickets or beetles, eat these larvae. Then, a mantis comes along and eats those insects—and that’s when the worm’s plan kicks in. Inside the mantis, the worm grows, sometimes getting incredibly long—almost a metre in length! But here’s the scary part: once it’s ready to come out, the worm somehow convinces the mantis to jump into water. Since mantises don’t usually go near water - this is totally out of character. But it’s exactly what the worm needs to escape and return to water, where it can lay its eggs and start the cycle all over again. How the worm hijacks the mantis Scientists recently figured out how this mind control might work. The horsehair worm seems to have stolen some of the mantis’s genes—literally. Through horizontal gene transfer, the worm picked up bits of mantis DNA and now uses that to trick the mantis’s body into listening to it. It produces proteins that imitate the mantis’s own, letting it send signals to the brain and change its behaviour. It’s not quite like science fiction—it’s real science, and it’s pretty creepy. Another strange effect of the parasite is that infected mantises suddenly start heading towards light. That might be because light reflecting off water helps the worm guide its host to a pond or stream. But sometimes this backfires—mantises have been found jumping onto shiny roads or car roofs, mistaking them for water. That’s how deadly the parasite’s influence can be. This gene-stealing, brain-hacking behaviour is extremely rare in the animal kingdom. It’s more common in bacteria, but to see a worm doing it to a mantis is something scientists are still trying to understand fully. What’s clear is that nature has some very strange ways of keeping life going—even if it means turning a predator into a puppet.
