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...

as a part of a major ecological study of hanna wetland, semirum region, isfahan province, parasitic infestation of 3 native and one introduced fish species were investigated. a total of 120 fish specimens were collected by both cast net and a series of gillnets between fall and winter 2007, and spring and summer 2008. some of the observed parasites are reported for the first time as new host re...

Experiments on neurons in the heart system of the leech reveal why rhythmic behaviors differ between individuals.

The Leech lattice has many strange properties, discovered by Conway, Parker, and Sloane. For example, it has covering radius √ 2, and the orbits of points at distance at least √ 2 from all lattice points correspond to the Niemeier lattices other than the Leech lattice. (See Conway and Sloane [6, Chaps. 22-28].) Most of the properties of the Leech lattice follow from the fact that it is the Dynk...

Interneurons in leech ganglia receive multiple sensory inputs and make synaptic contacts with many motor neurons. These "hidden" units coordinate several different behaviors. We used physiological and anatomical constraints to construct a model of the local bending reflex. Dynamic networks were trained on experimentally derived inputoutput patterns using recurrent backpropagation. Units in the ...

In 1960, Linker, Meyer, and Hoffman (1) reported that a crude leech preparation hydrolyzes the glucuronide linkages of hyaluronic acid, unlike bacterial and testes hyaluronidases, which act on glucosaminide linkages. This paper deals with the first systematic attempt to purify the leech P-glucuronidase that specifically hydrolyzes hyaluronic acid. Purified preparations of the enzyme have indeed...

Salivary gland extract from the South American leech Haementeria ghilianii, administered i.v. on the same day as the i.v. inoculation of T241 sarcoma cells, completely suppresses colonization of the mediastinal lymph nodes and markedly reduces the number and size of lung tumor colonies produced by this tumor. Additional studies indicate that the extract contains various types of proteinase inhi...

In this elementary talk, we introduce basics about rational lattices and give examples. Some lattices are really good ones, notably the E8-lattice in dimension 8 and the Leech lattice in dimension 24. Both have remarkable finite isometry groups and give sphere packings of remarkably high minimum norms and high packing densities. Generalizations to higher dimensions have been considered, for exa...

The use of medicinal leeches (Hiruda medicinalis) is becoming more common after plastic surgery to control venous congestion of skin grafts. We describe a patient with Aeromonas hydrophila infection whose graft was treated with medicinal leeches. The infection required systemic antibiotic therapy. A. hydrophila is the predominant bacterial flora in the gut of the leech, where it plays an essent...

and analogous bounds are established here for odd lattices satisfying certain technical conditions (which are trivial for N=1 and 2). For N>1 in (V), lattices meeting the new bound are constructed that are analogous to the ``shorter'' and ``odd'' Leech lattices. These include an odd associate of the 16-dimensional Barnes Wall lattice and shorter and odd associates of the Coxeter Todd lattice. A...