Medicinal leeches are aquatic predators that inhabit surface waters during daylight and also leave the water where they might be exposed to less screened light. Whereas the leech visual system has been shown to respond to visible light, leeches in the genus Hirudo do not appear to be as negatively phototactic as one might expect in order to avoid potential ultraviolet radiation (UVR)-induced da...

Real worms don't eat bacteria. Leeches are segmented, eucoelomate worms of the phylum Annelida, distinguished from other annelids by anterior and posterior suckers used for locomotion and feeding — on blood or soft body parts of other animals. They are not to be confused with nematodes, which lack these (and most other) features. Leeches are mainly aquatic, but the Asian land leeches are well k...

The medicinal leech, Hirudo verbana, is an aquatic predator that utilizes water waves to locate its prey. However, to reach their prey, the leeches must move within the same water that they are using to sense prey. This requires that they either move ballistically towards a pre-determined prey location or that they account for their self-movement and continually track prey. We found that leeche...

To investigate the phylogenetic relationships of leeches, branchiobdellidans, and acanthobdellidans, whole nuclear 18S rDNA and over 650 bp of mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I were acquired from 101 annelids, including 36 leeches, 18 branchiobdellidans, Acanthobdella peledina, as well as 28 oligochaetes and combined with homologous data for 17 polychaete outgroup taxa. Parsimony ana...

aims: a very common species of leeches has been named as hirudo medicinalis. regarding to the application of leeches in medicine and their fast extinction, this study was performed in aquatic habitats of kashan aimed to determine the distribution of leeches and to provide information about their regional and habitat characteristics. materials & methods: this descriptive study was conducted duri...

Hematophagous leeches express a broad variety of secretory factors in their salivary glands; among them are hirudins, inhibitors blood coagulation, and decorsins/ornatins, platelet aggregation. Here, we describe the identification molecular functional characterization putative hirudins decorsins/ornatins two leech species American origin, Limnobdella mexicana Haementeria vizottoi. The represent...

The emergence of leeches in modern medicine proves that they can be a useful treatment for many conditions. Bloodletting was practiced for millennia, with leeches being used for this purpose since the Stone Age. Leeches were misused until the discovery of germs. Leeches are now used in microsurgery to aid circulation. They have also been used in pain management for osteoarthritis. The chemicals...

There are 60 species of blood-feeding land leeches, 50 species belonging to the family Haemadipsidae and 10 species belonging to the family Xerobdellidae. Despite recent papers on the land leeches, their taxonomic identification is not fully understood, especially at a species level. In Korea, there have been no historical records of the terrestrial leeches, but recently an unrecorded blood-fee...

Two 60 day experiments on predation behavior of leeches were conducted concurrently. In the first, medicinal leeches, Hirudo orientalis (Utevsky and Trontelj, 2005) were fed to satiation on bovine blood and subsequently transferred into two large opaque plastic containers of equal size but with differing temperatures, 6-7?C and 23-24?C, containing starved Erpobdella octoculata (L.). At the high...