Jewel Wasp

Hide your kids, hide your wife!  Zombies are real and this mommy is a cold blooded zombifier!  Neatness is spooky this week with the parasitic emerald cockroach wasp (jewel wasp). The preggers she-wasp first injects venom between the front 2 legs of a regular non-zombie cockroach and paralyzes it. Then it switches positions and stings in the back of its neck. Basically this is zombification wasp foreplay and things are just getting caliente. Then the wasp employs the 3-strikes your out policy and uses specialized sensory organs on the tip of its stinger and injects a big load of venom into 2 precise locations in the roach's brain (the supra and sub-esophageal ganglion). The venom blocks a chemical substance called octopamine in the cock-a-roach's brain that controls its ability to walk, fight and talk (assuming cockroaches can talk). 

The primagravida wasp amputates the cockroach's antennae and drinks the roach's blood rich in sugar and protein.  She then bites down on the remaining stub of the antennae and leads the now zombie cockroach into a super secret death chamber where the wasp lays an egg on the zombie's abdomen and then covers the chamber and all the evidence with dirt.  Finally, the wasp larva hatches and eats the still alive zombie roach from the inside out.  The process takes around 7-8 days and it's important that the roach stays alive or else it would rot.  Best sexcapade ever! 

And to top it all off, there's a super neat video narrated by the sultan of neat, David Attenborough:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl_9kghmChw 

Cymothoa Exigua - the sex-changing parasitic tongue-eating louse

The neatness of this creature is kaleidoscopic: It seemingly goes on forever and if you look and think about it too much you'll get sick and confused. This neat creature is a sex-changing parasitic tongue-eating louse of the crustacean phylum (shrimp, lobster, crab).  An infant C. exigua lands in a fish's gills, infiltrates it and begins to develop into a male. Then when a second one appears in the gills it stimulates the first one to go all "lady boy" and turn from male into female (scientific term for Protandrous hermaphrodites I am pretty sure) and crawl up from the gills, through the throat and anchors herself to the tongue with her 7 pairs of legs. 

Then the 2nd creature is the male that impregnates the newly turned Betty. The neatness continues and the C. exigua that attached onto the tongue will not only suck blood and devour the tongue until it's a muscular stub, atrophies and falls off AND with the rose snapper fish it will replace the tongue with its body and provide the fish with a newly functional tongue. This is the only known instance in the animal kingdom of a parasite functionally replacing an organ of its host. How neat is that! 

Then after procreation is complete and it has released its freaky offspring and drained all the blood supply from the tongue, it is believed that the C. exigua does like Elsa and "let it go" from the stub that was once a tongue and gets swallowed by the fish.  Then the fish, with no tongue, eventually dies too.  

So let's sum up: a 14-legged hermaphroditic parasite get's all vampire-like and sucks the blood out the tongue of a fish, uses it for a bang pad, get's knocked up, kicks the kids out of the basement and forces them to find their own bang pad, then this things goes all Moby Dick gets swallowed when the well dries up.  NEAT!  

The Torquigener albomaculosus pufferfish - The Psychedelic Mushroom Taking Euclidian Scholar Pufferfish

Scientists were dumbfounded by intricate circles with geometric designs about six feet in diameter found on the seafloor off the coast of Amami-Ōshima Island in Japan. This is in itself super neat because that meant people would have to go on neat adventures to discover the culprits.  

In the last few years scientists discovered a new species of pufferfish, Torquigener albomaculosus, was responsible for these mystical underwater hippy designs.  It turns out males search far and wide for psychedelic sea mushrooms, talk about concepts such as time, space and the best way to eat Oreo cookies with there hommies and then construct the circles as spawning nests by swimming and wiggling in the seafloor sand. The nests, used only once, are made to attract females. The nests have double edges and radiating troughs in a spoke-like geometry. The designed ridges and grooves of the circle serve to minimize ocean current at the center of the nest which protects the eggs from the turbulent waters and possibly predators too.  Wow, this newly discovered species of pufferfish are clearly Euclidian scholars and super neat!   If only psychedelic sea mushrooms existed.  

Here's a video showing them creating some of their underwater designs:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOGvVn7IWVY