Texas Released Tiny Flies to Kill Fire Ants — Then Their Heads Started Falling Off

Texas Released Tiny Flies to Kill Fire Ants — Then Their Heads Started Falling Off An ant's head, sitting alone on bare dirt. No body attached. No wound, no blood, nothing torn. Just a head, popped clean off at the neck, resting in the grass like it had been set there on purpose. Scientists in Texas have watched this happen to fire ants by the thousands, and for years they refused to believe what was actually causing it. I'm Marcus Reed, and today I'm taking you into one of the strangest pest control decisions this country has ever made on purpose. Texas didn't spray a chemical to fight back against one of its most hated insects. It didn't set a trap. It imported a fly, roughly the size of a period at the end of this sentence, and let it loose in the wild, fully aware of exactly what that fly was going to do to its target. What happened next turned a swarming, stinging invader into a walking corpse, and it happened in a way researchers still find unsettling to describe out loud, decades into studying it. That's the story I want to walk you through today.