The Mission Impossible franchise is famous for its mask reveals. A dubiously explained technology allows an innocuous silver briefcase to print out a gummy-like mask that, once plastered to a face, transforms Tom Cruise into the spitting image of Philip Seymour Hoffman or various others, enabling him to infiltrate various lairs and turrets. The masks in Mission Impossible make for a fun game as a viewer: Is the bad guy you're watching really a bad guy, or is he actually Ethan Hunt?
If Mission Impossible ever took place in a colony of harvester termites in the mountains of Morocco, Ethan Hunt might be, for once, out of a job. A new paper in Current Biology describes how the larvae of a blow fly has evolved to live, apparently unnoticed, inside the nests of harvester termites. Its main strategy, it seems, is the "termite mask" that protrudes from its rump. This mask features two antennae, a pair of sensory palps, and two large red "eyes" that are actually breathing holes. (Yes, the termite breathes from its butt; so what!)
