No, not an obscure conspiracy theory about what happened in New Orleans, but rather a link to a somewhat disturbing article about how parasitic hairworms can actually control grasshoppers into drowning themselves, so they'll have easy access to water after they've eaten up their host.

I didn't apply an emotion tag to this entry because the only thing that would apply is "vaguely weirded out", and that's too long for a tag.

I find myself very curious as to the exact mechanism, however; in other cases where parasites have some form of behavioural control, such as with the aggression from rabies, or the odd weaving in the orb spiders mentioned in the article, the effect comes from triggering a behaviour already common (aggression), or interrupting an existing sequence (having a spider repeat only the first two stages of web weaving over and over again). I have no idea how the worms manage to convince grasshoppers to go swimming. That's not something grasshoppers really do, and I have a hard time seeing that as a reaction to something like thirst.