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Blood-sucking leeches use their anterior suckers to connect to hosts for feeding. Once attached, they use a combination of mucus and suction to stay in place while they inject hirudin into the hosts' blood. In general, blood-feeding leeches are non host-specific, and do little harm to their host, dropping off after consuming a blood meal. Some ...
These leeches have five pairs of eyes, with the last two separated by two eyeless segments. The family is monotypic , containing only the subfamily Haemadipsinae , though as the family can apparently be divided into two or three distinct lineages, at least one of the proposed splits , while not a distinct family, might be a valid subfamily.
Some, such as the European Piscicola geometra, take a blood meal and then drop off the host and hide somewhere while they digest the blood; [8] some, mostly in marine or estuarine habitats with soft substrates, attach themselves temporarily to a crustacean after leaving their fish host; others remain attached to a fish semipermanently. Leeches ...
Back of Macrobdella decora – note the row of orange dots down the middle and the two sets of black ones on the sides.. Macrobdella decora is a medium-sized leech, growing between 5 and 8.5 cm (2.0 and 3.3 in) long, and weighing from 1.48 to 3.69 grams (0.052 to 0.130 oz).
Turtle leeches are a genus, Ozobranchus, of leeches (Hirudinea) that feed exclusively on the blood of turtles. [2] Only two species—Ozobranchus margoi and Ozobranchus branchiatus—are found in the Atlantic coast of the United States and the Gulf of Mexico. Little is known about these leeches due to difficulties in studying their sea turtle ...
Like other leeches, H. verbana has anterior and posterior suckers that allow it to attach to a range of substrates in both air and water. It can even attach to porous, air-permeable substrates. In the wild, this ability may be relevant for attaching to porous rocks or the furry skin of host animals.
Glossiphoniid leeches exhibit remarkable parental care, the most highly developed one among the known annelids. They produce a membranous bag to hold the eggs, which is carried on the underside. The young attach to the parent's belly after hatching and are thus ferried to their first meal. [6] Certain Glossiphoniidae parasitize amphibian species.
There are four bundles of one to twenty-five chaetae on each segment; these have muscles attached to their bases and can be extended or retracted. [2] Leeches, order Hirudinida, [4] mostly have flattened bodies, usually tapered at both ends. They have a fixed number of segments, 33, but the segmentation is not visible externally because the ...