Many have evolved to have impressively specialised food sources: one desert variety lives in camels’ noses another feeds on bats.
Not all leeches suck blood and not all bloodsucking leeches seek the blood of humans. The leech is an invertebrate animal belonging to the phylum Annelida, a zoological category that includes more than 15,000 species of segmented bristle worms and 650 species of leeches in the subclass Hirudinea. Thousands of years since leeches were first employed for medicinal purposes, and a century since “leech mania” saw blood-letting used to tackle everything from headaches to strangulation, these creatures are still used to clean wounds and improve circulation, especially after surgery. The UK’s only leech production business looks like a health farm. A long and winding drive passes sheds of unclear purpose and ends in a small yard beyond an imposing cream-coloured manor house. Less than half a mile from the M4 motorway, in the south-west of Wales, there is a walled entrance off a road whose name I can’t pronounce, and a small sign saying Biopharm. You accept them equally calmly because it has been explained to you that these leeches may save your breast, or your finger, or your ear, or your life. But you are equally likely to be in a sterile room of a modern hospital, tended by nurses who attach these bloodsucking animals to you without a shiver. Are you wading through a tropical pond in fierce humidity? Have you returned to your guesthouse to find with horror a passenger on your leg? Possibly. After that, the jaws will activate, the hundreds of teeth will engage, the leech will begin to eat, and its meal is your blood.
0 kommentar(er)
