How I became bait for bloodsucking leeches
by Mark Siddall
For most zoologists, fieldwork involves lying low and watching
quietly as animals wander by. That is not Mark Siddall's approach.
Instead, he rolls up his pant legs, wades into murky waters, and calmly
becomes a host for bloodsucking leeches. Siddall, a curator of
invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New
York, is one of the world's foremost leech experts.
His particular interest is learning how the parasites developed the
ability to keep the blood of their victims flowing; his research could
lead to new anti-clotting drugs for humans. In his own words, he
describes a recent successful leech encounter.
Heart attacks and strokes result from clots. It turns out leeches
have already figured out how to prevent clots over the course of their
evolution. I want to learn about all the molecules they use to
accomplish this, so my job is to find as many different species of
leeches as I can.
My expedition to Peru was especially fruitful. We started out in the
Andes Mountains, elevation 16,000 feet, to look for a lake that had been
recorded in the 1880s as having the highest-altitude leech ever found.
We found the site, but the problem was that local mining operations
had obliterated the lake. Fortunately, just as we were about to leave
for lower ground, I spotted another small lake nearby. We jumped in,
turned over some rocks to unsettle any leeches that might be in the
sediment, and felt some pinches on the skin. We found the highest leech
ever, a new species I'm still trying to classify.
Then we flew down to northeastern Peru and took a three-hour boat
ride on the headwaters of the Amazon River. I had my fiancée with me.
At one point, we wandered through a pond.
The water was up to my chest, up to her chin. And we found a
blood-feeding leech there - another new species, Oxyptychus bora.
To cap it all off, my colleague Renzo Arauco-Brown and I finalised a
paper on an Amazonian leech he had found in a person's nostrils. (That
was new to me, although I once had to take a leech out of someone's ear
- that was awkward.)
- Discover Magazine
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