Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Leeches (featuring Dr. Anna Phillips)

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Daniel and Kelly chat with Dr. Anna Phillips about the disgusting and fascinating world of leeches. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dresses Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. When most people, people think of leeches, they're immediately disgusted. Or at least that's been my experience when I talk to people about leeches. But what is it about leeches that results in so much more disgust than we feel when we talk about other bloodsuckers like mosquitoes? Maybe it's

that scene from Stand By Me or that scene from African Queen or maybe it's something else altogether. And look, today I'm sure we're not going to convince most of you that leeches are beautiful. But I hope that when you listen to this episode, Anna and I are able to convince you that leeches are, okay, fine, maybe they're disgusting, but they're also fascinating. And maybe they're even helpful to people. So for example, you know, maybe you've heard that leeches used to be used to try to draw blood to treat just about any problem that humans used to have a long time ago. But did you know that leeches are still used in particular medical cases and they're actually helpful? And that leeches

produce anticoagulants, which are these chemicals that make sure your blood doesn't clot up. that are useful in a variety of medical settings. So understanding leeches can be helpful for human health as well. On today's episode, we have Dr. Anna Phillips, who's the curator of earthworms and parasitic worms at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. And I can't think of a better person to talk to us today about leeches. So welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary,

and sometimes a little bit disgusting, universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've never been bitten by a particle. Hi, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I'm a parasitologist, and I've been bitten by leeches, and it was okay. It was fine in the end. Clearly, they've infected you with some sort of brain disease that made you think it was Okay. You know, we're going to learn today that surprisingly they don't vector a lot of diseases, unlike mosquitoes and ticks. They're not so bad. They're just hungry, which I get. I get that. You've been brainwashed. You've been leech washed by leeches. I am not okay with being bitten by leeches. Well, I'm hoping that we can leech wash at least a few of our listeners today into thinking that leeches are maybe still gross, but that there's absolutely some fascinating stuff to learn from them. All right. Well, then my question for you today, Kelly, is what is the grossest thing you have been

bitten by. Oh, gosh, the grossest thing I've been bitten by. I guess that's got to be ticks. Ticks are the worst. I hate ticks. I really hate ticks. Like, leeches, I'm okay with ticks, man. I hate them.

You know, so you get a take, you pull it off and you're like, oh, well, now should I send it in for testing? Do I have to worry that I got Lyme disease? What about, you know, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever? And whereas if you get bit by a leech, you're just like, oh, I'm bleeding a little. That stinks. But you don't worry about what's going to happen afterwards. Like, that's the end of the encounter.

And I get bit by ticks pretty often and it kind of freaks me out. I regularly spray my clothes with permethrin during the summer when I'm going to be going out in the woods. And like every member of our family has a set of permethrin treated clothes that they wear if they're going to be going out into the woods because we've already had some lime in the family and we don't want any more. What about you? What's the weirdest or grossest thing you've ever been bitten by? Not a particle. I was bitten by our pet rats once. So I have had a rat bite.

And in their defense, my finger was covered with whipped cream. and I stuck it in the cage, and they got very enthusiastic. I don't think they were trying to bite my finger, but, you know, how could you control yourself? It's whipped cream. I get it. I'm sorry. I understand the rats in that case. I've also been bit by a boa constrictor when I went to feed it a rat, and I wasn't really

careful about what I was doing with my hand. And then I also got bit once by an alligator gar. Have you seen these? Is that like an alligator? It's a fish with an alligator-like mouth. They're common in the south, but there's also some in Lake Erie. and I was doing a fish survey, and I thought one had passed away, but even though it was very dry, it was still kicking, so I grabbed it by the tail and it turned around and I was like, ah, I'm so sorry. It's biting you and you're apologizing to it. Wow, you're so polite.

I mean, if I were on the way out and somebody was harassing me, I would be grumpy about that too. I understood where it was coming from. But yeah, sorry, your story reminded me of some of my other stories that how could I have forgotten? Well, your comment earlier about not being too grumpy by giving blood to leeches made me think about mosquitoes, because, because we recently had mosquitoes basically taking over Southern California. When I moved here 20 years ago, there were almost no mosquitoes. And now they're mosquitoes everywhere. It drives me crazy because I would happily give up a little bit of blood to mosquitoes. If they didn't deposit the anesthetic that you then react to, like, it frustrates me endlessly.

I would like set out a little pool of blood, you know, for them every day. If we could strike a deal with mosquitoes, like just stop giving me bites and drink my blood. I would happily give up blood to avoid mosquitoes. If only we could have like a Dr. Doolittle, but who could communicate with the mosquitoes to set that kind of exchange up? That would be ideal. Why do you have so many more mosquitoes? Has a new species moved in? Is it wetter with more standing pools of water? What change? I read this story once that claimed that they all came in one shipping container to Long Beach from China and they basically took over. Like it was a huge invasion of this Chinese tiny mosquito, not like the big American mosquitoes, but these little ones that also bite you multiple times. So you don't just get like one bite, you could like a series of bites. Jerks. Ooh, really not a fan.

Wait, why was China shipping us mosquitoes? They just accidentally got into a shipment. Is that the deal? Or somebody ordered mosquitoes on Amazon and now we're all suffering. No, I think it was an accident. Yeah, there was some pool of standing water in the shipping container and they survived the transit and they opened it up in Long Beach. Dot, dot, dot.

My life is now terrible. That's the worst. I'm sorry. We've got the Asian Longhorn tick, which I think also accidentally got here. And it can reproduce without finding a mate. You get one and then you've got 10. And then you've got hundreds. And there are cattle out here that are getting like exanguinated.

If they're not checked on regularly enough, they end up getting tons of them. And then they don't have enough blood to do what they need to do. So anyway. Exanguinated. My mental image is that you go out to check on your cow and it's just like a dry heap of skin and bones. Is that what we're talking about? I think they die before they look how you might imagine Dracula looks waking up in the morning. But yeah, I mean, they're dying from lack of blood.

And I think there's some concern that there's a hemorrhagic fever in the native area that, like, could jump to here. And now instead of, in addition to Lyme, you'd have to worry about hemorrhagic fevers. And anyway, it's so great that we can ship stuff around the world, but it's got its downsides. All right. Well, today we're not just talking about what Daniel doesn't like to be bitten by and what Kelly doesn't mind being bitten by. We're talking about all the exciting signs behind leeches. And so we asked you, what is the first thing you think? when you think of leeches.

And I gotta say, I got a couple answers that I expected, a couple that were very unexpected. And if you would like to be asked what you think about a topic we're gonna talk about on the show, email us at Questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. So let's hear what our listeners had to say. A picture that I've seen of a black hole

eating the material from a closely orbiting star. Honestly, they're just the worst and I can't think of anything more disgusting. The first thing I think of is medical-grade leeches that are used to drain blood from hematomas, bruises under the skin that have a lot of blood in them. The first thing I think of when I hear leeches is traveling down the Brazos River in Texas on a Boy Scout trip

and on an inner tube and coming out with leeches stuck to the inner tube and a few to my legs. No fun. Watching the movie The African Queen with Catherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart and they have to tow his boat through the swamp, waiting in the swamp, and when they get out, they're covered with leeches, and they have to spread salt on the leeches to get them off. Medieval medical practices where they were used for almost everything, from headaches to ingrown toenails, I don't know, conjunctivitis,

that or it being one of Dracula's favorite pets. They're seen and stand by me where they're swimming, across the swamp and they suddenly discovered that they're covered in leeches i think of the movie stand by me wasn't there an old black and white movie called attack of leeches or something it seemed from stand by me the third thing that comes to mind is the irs i think of the way they arrived and twisted when i discovered them as a kid i thought it was swimming around my finger in a strange way then i picture my mom screaming the barber surgeon from the middle ages applying them medicinally.

I'll put that in quotes. So I love that the very first answer that hit my inbox was a picture that I've seen of a black hole eating the material from a closely orbiting star. I was like, wow, in my world, that is not what you would expect the answer to be. But like, I see that. That's a fascinating answer. That was great. That's our audience right there, physics, biology crossover.

Yeah, it's amazing. And then most of the other responses were, like, I expected people to mention stand by me. And I expected people to mention that one movie with Catherine Hepburn, African Queen, I think it was, and then mostly to be grossed out. And so that was more or less what I was expecting. What did you think? Yeah, these answers basically mimic my thoughts about leeches. I'm totally uninformed. I don't know anything about leeches compared to anything else, except that I'm grossed out with anything bites me.

So I'm curious to learn, what is the science of leeches? What are leech scientists, leechologists working on? what motivates somebody to get into leeches anyway rather than basically any other field of science. So, yeah, I want to meet your friend and hear all about leeches. Wait, wait. So would you say that this is at the bottom of the list of science jobs you would want studying leeches? It's not near the top. That's for sure. I wouldn't put it in the top 50 or a thousand science jobs. I mean, I think I'm pretty capable of getting interested in almost anything. But yeah, this is a bit of a gross out factor for me. I got to say, if somebody said

you could be the leech person at the Smithsonian Museum. I'd be like, I enjoyed studying space, but I'm studying leeches now, and I would make that jump. All right, so today we are talking to Dr. Anna Phillips. She works for the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C., and she is just delightful, and she's going to tell us all about leeches. And wait for it. I'm going to make a connection between Kelly's two passions, space and leeches. Yeah, that was pretty clever at the end there.

All right. Enjoy. Dr. Anna Phillips is a research zoologist and curator of clitolata, which is a class of anilid worms, also known as earthworms, and parasitic worms at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. She studies biodiversity and the evolutionary history of parasitic worms and specializes in leeches and tapeworms. She's my hero. In my world, she's a legend for doing her leech dance in a video for the BBC, which we're going to discuss later in the show. Welcome, Anna. Hi.

I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you here. Did I say Clittalotto right or did I say it wrong? Works for me. Nice. Oh, man. I always love it when I get those slam dogs right from the beginning. So, you know, I think for a lot of people when we're growing up as kids, like I thought maybe I would study tigers or elephants or, you know, maybe anything other than worms living in the brains of fish. What was your path to getting excited about leeches? I was definitely not a five-year-old who thought I would grow up to study worms. It was a little bit of a winding road. When I was a kid, I was really excited about dinosaurs.

They were sort of a good introduction into the scientific world for me. But as I got older, I realized there were a lot more other cool animals out in the world. And when I was an undergraduate, I applied for an internship through a program run by the National Science Foundation called Research Exhibition. experience for undergraduates, the REU program. And it's funded by the National Science Foundation, and it's an opportunity for students to go work in science labs and working with the real scientists, and to work on projects to learn about the scientific research process. And there were many different projects. There were ones on scorpions and bats and bees and catfish. And there was one on leeches. And I thought, oh, no one will apply for the one on leeches.

I'll have better odds. That's amazing. Yeah, so I applied, and it turns out six people applied. Oh. But I was selected, and that summer ended up being everything I thought science should be. There was work with specimens, there was field work. I went to a conference, got to work in the molecular lab, and we ended up being able to publish it. Nice.

So then my advisor invited me back for a PhD to expand the project from my internship, and it was the rest of history. Do you think that you were lucky that you happened to stumble on a field you were fascinated by, or are you just the kind of person who can, like, dig into anything and find the mysteries and the juicy questions and that you just happen to end up in this field? I think there's a quality of researchers who like to dig in and find the juicy questions. So in some sense, I could have ended up in other places and studying other animals. But leeches ended up being a really good fit for me. I had always found worms to be more interesting than like mollusks or insects or other things.

It's also a good fit in the sense that like no matter where you go in the world, people know what leeches are. It's like the one worm that everyone you can say like, oh, the blood-sucking worms and, you know, sort of point to your skin. And people are like, oh, I know what that is. So even if they don't speak English, I think things worked out in a way. But yeah, I do kind of get distracted sometimes and find other things that I could dive in. on. You have to go, no, no, remember, parasites. So when students contact me and they say, oh, I want to go into marine biology, I'm like, okay, I know you're excited about the dolphins, but an easier way in is the dolphin parasites, because fewer people are excited about those,

and then you can become a marine biologist through the parasites. And I'm really hoping that they're going to get hooked on the parasites. And I have been surprised by how many students do get hooked on the parasites. And then they're like, yeah, yeah, the dolphins are cool. But have you looked at this worm? And I'm like, yes. We've hooked you. Exactly. Yeah. And this is what I tell a lot of students coming through is that it's good to have a goal and to be ambitious and to be aiming for something, but also have the flexibility to have flexible interests, I would say.

Because like I said, I wanted to study dinosaurs and now I study worms. And they don't even have fossils. But, you know, it worked out. I'm pretty happy. I'm glad you're happy. So let's talk about where leeches are on the tree of life. So like what are their closest relatives and then also like how many species of leaves? leeches, do we think that there are?

So, like you said in your intro, leeches are cladolid-anilid's. So in Annalita, these are the segmented worms with body cavities. So there's all the polychaetes, which are the marine worms, which I don't focus on those because I don't work in marine environments very often. And then the other analytes are the chlydala-anelids. This includes the oligatees, which includes earthworms. It also includes branky of deladins, which are the crayfish worms. So they're symbiotic worms that live with crayfish.

They're not parasitic. They're a commensal organism. And then they're the leeches. With the leeches, about half of them are blood feeding and the other half aren't. What are the other half doing? They're eating insect larvae, bacterial mats, just about anything to get their mouths around. But they're not sucking blood. So they're not as interesting. So what are the big open science questions about leeches? I think it's fascinating that Kelly's first question is like, How do these relate to other living critters?

Where do you put them on the tree of life? How do we organize them? Is that the motivating question? Is it like all to try to understand how everything got here in the evolutionary history of it? Or are there still mysteries about like, how do leeches accomplish this amazing thing they do? What are the sort of biggest open questions there in leeches? My research is with systematics in evolution. So looking at the number of species, describing new species, how they're related to each other.

So that's most of what my expertise is. And it's also what I find interesting. There are so many other aspects of leech biology that have many interesting questions. So for leeches, there's probably between 800 and 1,000 species of leeches in the world, which compared to a lot of other worm groups is pretty small. Like nematodes has probably more than 16,000 species. So the order of tapeworms that I work in has more than 3,500 species. So 800 is pretty small, but what's really cool about leeches is all the different

evolutionary transitions within that group in terms of the interesting questions it's looking at like wow we have so many different feeding strategies they occur in so many different environments there's marine leeches there's terrestrial leeches there's burrowing leeches well as the blood feeders and so with all of these different evolutionary transitions it's a more tractable group to explore those questions because you don't have to go through 500 species you can look at smaller groups with 20 or something, which is easier to approach. And then, like I said, they're pretty accessible. You can go to a lot of different places in the world and find leeches, a lot of different

habitats, and that can be easier than, like, studying things in the deep sea, for instance, where it's very expensive and involves a lot of equipment and planning. So when we asked our audience what they think of when they think of leeches, a number of them noted that in, like, medieval times, leeches were used to treat like every single disease you could imagine. And so I was wondering if you could speak at all to the current use of leeches in medicine. I know that's not systematic. Is it okay to ask you about that? Sure, yeah. Yeah, this is actually one of the points of why leeches are important to the world because of their use in medicine. They've also been used as a model organism in a number of other fields like

neurology and some importance in pharmacology and developmental biology studies. But when it comes to their use in medicine. Yeah, they were really popular in the 17-1800s for bloodletting. Prior to that, people would cut open arteries and veins to balance the humors and get some of the blood out. But leeches were an improvement on the situation because it's easier to get it to stop bleeding versus when you slice open artery and vein. It can be a challenge. Also, if you want to take more blood, you put more leeches on. If you want to take less blood, you take them off. it was a more controllable way of bloodletting. Just to be clear, it wasn't helping anything, right?

It was just like a less damaging way to damage your patient. And that was the benefit back then? Is that right? They thought it was helping. Okay. But now we know that leeches are only beneficial in certain cases. It's not going to cure your headache. It's not going to cure hysteria. So the bloodletting only helps certain situations.

So today, in modern medicine, leeches are still used. They were approved as a medical device in the U.S. in 2004, so they're not experimental. So what they're used for in modern medicine is because leeches have anticoagulants in their saliva. So when they're biting, they're exuding this antiquagulose, this blood thinner, that's going locally into the wound. And it helps the leach because the wound continues to bleed. And the antiquagulant prevents it from clotting. So that means that the leech can ingest the liquid blood easier. But once the leach has finished feeding and it leaves, that would,

wound continues to bleed because those antiquagulants are in a tissue. We take advantage of this in medicine, so in cases where you have a skin graft that has been attached, or a digit reattachment, so you cut your finger off and they put it back on. They can attach a lot of the small vessels that bring blood into the digit, but the veins that take the blood away are thinner walled. It's harder to attach those, and a lot of times they get the major vessels together, but they have to wait for those veins to regrow on their own. In the meantime, this means all the blood is rushing into this digit. It's swelling up. It's turning purple. It's painful. We can give anticoagulants and blood thinners systemically, like through the whole body, but you have a risk of major

bleeding. And it's kind of overkill when you just need to get it into that digit. So leeches have really tiny mouths, and we put them on the ends of fingers and noses and ears. And when they start feeding that anticoagulant goes locally. It helps keep all of the blood flowing, so there's no clotting. And then they're relieving that pressure by sucking the blood out. And it encourages oxygenated blood to get into this damaged tissue. And so you can see within hours, these fingers and toes go from being purple and swollen to suddenly looking which more normal and pink and healthy again. Aside from all the leeches hanging off of it. Well, yeah, I mean, they feed pretty quickly, so they're not going to be there too long.

It almost sounds like you're recommending leeches. In certain cases. Wow. They can be a preferable option to other options. We also have machines that you can put and suck out blood, but those you typically adhere better to broad surfaces, like your back or your leg, but things like fingers and noses and ears have funny shapes. And so leeches, they attach better.

That blows my mind. I think the pop-scient understanding of leeches, at least superficial one that I have as a total non-expert, is that like people used to use leeches back when they understood nothing about the body and it was crazy, like drilling holes in your head. But now you're telling me that there are some scenarios where leeches can actually improve the outcome for a patient. And that makes me wonder, do you think those experiences, hundreds of years ago before we understood stuff, are what encouraged people to continue using them that sometimes they actually did help? I think there's a quality to that, definitely. Like I said,

they're not a cure-all, but there were some cases that leeches are helpful. Wow. And then that also promoted a lot of research into why. So as we, you know, develop more questions, part of that is looking at those anticoagulants is saying, like, well, what anticoagulants are leeches using? And can we take that into a pharmacology setting and, you know, use those mechanisms without having to actually use the worms themselves? And what they found is that a lot of leeches have churidin, and this is an anticoagulant.

That's actually the most powerful anticoagulant known. In fact, we don't use it in modern medicine because it's too good. So one of the things about anticoagulants is that when it's causing the blood to continue flowing, we also want to have the ability to stop that. If you have an antiquagulant in your system and you have a major bleeding episode, we want to be able to stop that quickly. And geridin is not the best for that. We have a hard time getting it to stop.

So we have other options now. But it is something that's out there and the scientific community is working with understanding the mechanisms and the process to improve drug development. So mosquitoes and ticks also make anticoagulants. Why don't we use them when your finger falls off? Or leach is just even better or less creepy? In terms of why the leech anticoagulants would be preferable, I actually don't know. No. I refuse to believe the mosquitoes could do anything useful for anybody. They are purely evil.

I'm not a fan either. A lot of people would agree with you. I think leeches are much more controllable versus mosquitoes and ticks, especially in a medical setting. In the other aspect is that leeches carry far fewer diseases than mosquitoes and ticks. Could you tell us more about that? So to this point, they've done a ton of research looking at our leeches vectors for blood-borne diseases. And some of the work that was done, especially in the 90s, when people were really investigating HIV to see if leeches were a vector for HIV. And what they found is that when a leach feeds on a mouse, for instance, this infected with these viruses, you can still isolate the virus from the blood meal inside the leach. But when they fed the leech on the next mouse that

didn't have those viruses, it doesn't necessarily transmit. Okay. So if you're out, you know, getting bitten by leeches, you know, could you get viruses? and blood-borne pathogens from that is possible, but it's a very, very low chance. That's also a good thing about using leeches in modern medicine versus things like mosquitoes and ticks, which transmit a lot of really scary, dangerous viruses. Hmm. In other hosts for leeches, there are a lot of leeches that, for example, specialize on turtles. Like, do they transmit diseases between turtles or in general are leeches just not good

at transmitting diseases? Actually, it's great that you bring up leeches and turtles because there's a couple of cases of different types of blood-borne parasites between the turtles. So for one, we know that they can transmit trapanosomes, which is the same organism that causes African sleeping sickness, but it's not making turtles sleepy. So we do know that leeches have been transmitting tropanosomes with turtles. Could you tell if a turtle was sleepy? They move pretty slow. Maybe it does make them sleepy, and we just can't tell. Someone should look into it.

The other thing is that they'll transmit hemagregrens, which are a small blood-borne pathogen. But as far as we know, it's not making the turtles sick, what we found is that turtles that have a small home range have fewer species of hemagregrigrants versus turtles that have a wider range encounter have more species, which means that they're encountering more leeches and more different types of blood-borne pathogens. but it means that the turtles that are wandering farther away, which we would assume would be healthier. They actually have a higher number of these blood parasites. So in this case, it may indicate that the turtles are doing better. So maybe the blood parasites, they don't hurt them that much. And so the healthy turtles are moving around a lot.

And when they get blood parasites, they're like, whatever. Yeah, as far as we know. Huh. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Okay, we're going to take a break. And then we are going to talk about other. kinds of hosts that we find leeches on. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

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In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious oh wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.

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Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.

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I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so Anna, I'm generally interested in the different kinds of species that end up getting bitten by leashes. But I really want to know what is the weirdest place you've ever heard a leech found on an animal?

leeches will feed on a lot of different hosts but it depends on the kind of leech so some leeches have preferences and others don't really care so in north america like macrob della decora the north american medicinal leech for instance they just want vertebrate blood it doesn't really matter they'll go for frogs a lot of frog blood but also they'll feed on fish mammals including humans so some leeches doesn't really matter. Other leeches can be pretty specific. Like, they prefer turtles and maybe a fish, especially in the marine environments, fish leeches. They will actually prefer certain groups of fish. So, yeah, it's all over the place, but it does depend on the type of leech and what their preferences are. Why would a leach evolve of preference? Isn't it better to be able to suck on lots of different kinds of stuff? You would think this kind of gets into like generalists versus specialist in biology and it's what's working for it. So most of our audience is physics and astronomy geeks.

So could you just go into a little bit more detail on specialists and generalists? Do we understand in general why evolution produces both kinds of things? What would inspire one direction versus another? What causes it? Do we understand that at all? I'm not sure we do in leeches. Okay, so here, I'm just going to spitball for a second. I can imagine that it could be great to be able to drink the blood.

from any mammal you come across. It'd be easier to find food. But if you're a specialist, maybe you are more used to a particular kind of blood, so it's easier for you to extract resources or energy from it. Here's a question. When leeches bite a host, is there anything in the host like that's an immune response that tries to attack and kill the leech? Or do leeches just get free meals everywhere they go? Because I can imagine if you specialize in a certain kind of host, maybe you get good at avoiding their ways of trying to kill you. But I guess do leeches just not have those kinds of problems? With other types of parasites, that immune response is really important. And I agree on that point. With leeches, because they're temporary ectoparasites,

they're not there long enough to really have to deal with host immune system all that much. I don't know how much that's playing a role in their feeding preferences. I think it's probably more along the lines of how frequently they encounter good hosts. So especially leeches and marine environments that are feeding on fish aren't always great swimmers. So when they get on a fish, they tend to stay there. And then there is the possibility that if that fish gets eaten by another fish, they may transfer at that point.

But a lot of that is like very short distances that they can cross on their own. So maybe fish that's in current schools where there's many options and so the leech doesn't have to go very far that would be an instance where being a specialist you know they can get by with it but for a leach this out in like a pond and may not have all that many individuals of a frog for instance they would then want to have more options available and so that they can go for the fish or the frogs or you know a bird or the occasional person yeah so i think it's more about like how many different species that they're encountering in the abundance of those species.

Okay, cool. So when I look at a leech, I always get frustrated when people say, oh, parasites, they're just these degenerate organisms, but like, you know, they don't appear to be able to move around much and they don't seem to have a lot of sensory organs. How do leeches find and get to their hosts? Because they just look like these little blobs. How do they navigate their environment? There's a lot of questions about this, I will say.

This is a very, well, it should be an active area of research. so leeches have incredible senses many leeches have eyes so there are little pigment cumps that detect light, dark, and movements they're not like our eyes that actually see images but they don't like light

because that means that they're exposed and they're easier to be eaten so they want to kind of gravitate towards darkness but at the same time that movement and a potential host is nearby they want to go towards that so they have eyes

they have sensili on their bodies that these little papilla, these little bumps that when they're in the water, they can feel the vibrations. And that helps them swim. And granted, they're not the fastest swimmers, but they will swim in the direction of that movement to go investigate and say, oh, is there something I can eat over here? Do they ever latch onto the wrong thing? Like, they latch onto something they think is a person, and they try to suck on it, and it's just like, you know, a slimy blob of moss or something? Well, I don't know how much the slimy blob of moss is moving, but I don't know if they're

trying to bite, but they definitely will investigate things they're moving. Something else about a lot of leeches, that they like flat surfaces. It's easier for them to stick to. And so a lot of times when you're out, especially in places where there's a lot of debris and trash, they will stick to broad surfaces of things like bottles and pie plates and just any kind of flat debris. They'll just kind of hang out there. I don't think they're necessarily looking for a host, but it's something, you know,

they can get underneath and they can stick too easily. I've seen them on soda cans. Yeah, exactly. Yes. It was another part to your question. I was going to interrupt and tell the story about why in my world you are so famous. And it's because you got to be on the BBC once and you use the fact that they responds to vibrations or movements in the water. And you danced in a BBC video to attract the leeches.

Is that usually how you attract the leeches? Does that mean that they're biting you for you to get them? Or tell us about collecting leeches? and then we'll get back to the sensory stuff. Yeah, so one of the things that we have done, those of us who have been trying to collect as many leeches as we can for our research, is to use ourselves as bait. This obviously only works in the blood feeders,

but when we go out into a pond, we want to get out and look everywhere. So this involves, you know, getting into the water about knee-deep. We look through plants, submerged debris like I was talking about, but it's also like tree limbs and rocks and anything that a leech could be hiding under. And while we're doing all of that, we're making a fair bit of motion in the water

and we're disturbing it a lot. For the BBC interview, we were specifically interested in the macrobdella leeches that I was talking about earlier, the North American medicinal leeches. So when we got out into the water, one thing we were doing was trying to make a lot of movement, a lot of disturbance to try and attract the leeches.

It's kind of like a leech dance. trying to just get as many ripples in the water as possible so that when they do detect that motion, they'll swim closer. But they're not super fast. And so it takes some time. So we get in, we make some ripples in the water. You know, everybody has their own style. Like some people are more consistent, you know, up and down.

Some people are side to side. A lot of room for individuality here. But you do that and then you kind of let everything quiet down so the leeches, you know, can swim closer. And then you have to kind of go again because they take a minute. because they're slow, can you see them coming towards you and catch them in a net? Or do you not know until they've bit you that, like, I have a specimen for the museum now? I like to try and see and get them before they're attaching, because when they're attaching,

they're going to try and bite probably, because they're hungry. That's why they're seeking out a host. But many leashes, you'll see them swimming across the surface of the water, and you can use a net, or you can use your hands and grab them. But some leeches are more sneaky, and they kind of dive down, and then you don't know. So when you're doing the leech dance and you're making all these ripples in the water, you have to stop periodically

and also do a leg check, foot check to make sure they haven't gotten somewhere that you can't see because it's below the water. And if you do get them before they bite, then that's a bonus. But if you don't,

sometimes you find the leech when it's already bitten and it's being worst case scenarios you pull your leg out of the water and it's already bleeding and the leech is gone. Oh, yes, as a scientist, that is a bummer. I've never seen Daniel make this space before, to be honest.

And Daniel and I have been working together for a while. Well, you know, I'm a particle physicist and I've never been bitten by a particle and I don't really have to worry about that kind of thing. I don't have to like take one for the team for science. Is this a regular thing? Like, how many times have you been bitten by leeches? Is it like so many times you can't even count or imagine? Exactly. I've lost count.

Oh, my God. I mean, actually, I try to avoid getting bitten. Me too. Yeah. Open wounds in, you know, muddy water can, invite other problems that I'd like to avoid. But also, a lot of people over time, you know, if you do this for your whole career, you know, so 30 years of getting bitten by leeches, some people develop an allergy to it and I'd like to avoid that. The other possibility is that you

can always wear waiters, broad surface the leach will attach to, so you make the movement, but it's less fun. You make it sound like anybody wearing anti-leach protection is like a wimp or something. You could wear waiters if you have to. Oh, well, I actually I actually have converted to waiters recently, so the only problem with waiters is they get hot. So hot. And then you're sweaty and you stink the rest of the day. And sometimes they get a leak and then it's hard to walk because your feet are heavy. And I totally get not wanting to go in with waiters.

It's not even a question for me so much rather be hot and stinky than bitten by leeches. I've talked to people who study mosquitoes and to keep the mosquito colony alive, you know, they can get blood bags. Sometimes if they know that they're not infected by anything, they'll feed them with their arms. Does stuff like that ever happen with leeches where you're like, oh, these need to stay alive for another week or two, but I don't have anything other than my arm or does that just kind of not happen with leeches? How do we feed the medical leeches? I actually don't know how they're feeding them in the labs, but for leeches for my research, I'll bring them back live a lot of times. And I like to show people leeches because I work at the Natural History Museum. So we have a lot of visitors.

and if we have the opportunity, I like to keep live leeches around to show off. But they don't need to eat all that often. So they can survive for several months without eating. Wow. That's convenient. It's very convenient, especially because it can be a little bit of a process to feed them. Like you said, you know, getting bags of blood.

Leeches, you can't just pour the blood in the water. They can't, like, absorb it. They have to suck it out of something. So usually we'll get blood from. biological company or the butcher and put it in a nitrile plastic glove poke a hole so the leeches know what's in there and then they will go for it i was sure you were going to say interns they use you hire summer interns and use those to feed the leeches way too much paperwork this is the federal government um but it has happened occasionally where everybody's kind of you know

in the break room on a friday evening and they're like hey anna bring the leeches so in that kind of setting because when they're feeding they use all of the muscles in their body to suck the blood out and then they move the blood through their body with all of their muscles that means they're really vulnerable to predators during that time so when they're feeding they need to feel super safe so if it's dark if it's quiet and that is not necessarily the break room on Friday afternoon but if you turn down the lights and you sing it a nice song sometimes it works out yeah sometimes exactly and if they're hungry enough but no one here has ever fed leeches.

I believe you, 100%. Do we know anything about the evolution to get from earthworms to blood-sucking leeches? Do we know anything about the steps in between? Like, how do you get from one strategy to another? It's a great question. That's something that we have been debating for over 100 years with leeches,

especially because the closest relatives are the brankyobdelidens, the crayfish worms, and they're commensal. So they're not necessarily feeding on blood, Now, what's interesting is that the crayfish gets injured, like it loses a leg or a claw comes off, and there's brinkiebdelidins nearby, they will all go to that wound and start feeding on the crayfish blood. Huh. But they won't necessarily make the wound themselves. Okay, so that seems like it could be like a step on the way.

Like you live with the crayfish and then you feed on it when it gets hurt, and then you eventually have the ability to hurt them and suck their blood. Yeah, but the brankybdeladins, there aren't any parasitic brankybdeladins. And then with leeches, there's been this long debate about did the ancestral leech, was it blood feeding or not. And we still don't know the answer to that because it happened so long ago, our molecular data, the DNA sequences haven't kept that signature very strong in the data. So we still kind of debate about that. Within certain groups, we can tell that, yes, there was a blood feeding ancestor. So for instance, in the group that I have spent the most time working on, the jawed leeches, they have jaws. They have teeth. They make little bites and then they suck blood out of that wound.

But there's also species that don't feed on blood. They still have teeth, though. And that's usually it helps them to chew up the earthworms as they're eating them or to chew up the insect larvae as they consume it. And what's interesting about that group is it does look like the ancestor of that group was a non-blood-feeding leech. And then there was a transition to blood feeding within the group. But there's also been several independent transitions back to non-bloodfeeding. Huh. So it seems like something that does change, you know, depending on the group and what environment they're found in. Yeah, there's a lot of different feeding strategies.

It doesn't seem like it's a hard strategy to transition to if it's happening multiple times. Right. Interesting. I would have guessed that processing blood would be way different than eating an earthworm. It should be. Yeah. But these leeches have found a way to maximize where they are. Once that transition occurs, you know, there's several species that'll maintain that.

Yeah, it seems to be relatively plastic, I would say. Okay. All right. Well, let's take another break, and we'll come back and talk more about some weird leeches. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

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My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's Back to School Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants. wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not?

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you were searching hippobuts. Is it true that there is a hippobut leech? You are correct. There is Placobdelah's Yeager school die. It is typically found in the rectum of hippos. In the rectum of hippos. That's an even more extreme environment. So that leech needs to not just find a hippo, but it needs to find a hippo and then it needs to figure out which end is the back end. And that sounds like a difficult search problem for a tiny little leech, but this also sounds like a hard thing to study because hippos are very dangerous. Do we know how those leeches figure out which end of the hippo is the right end? It's a good question. I don't know, but there are other leeches that tend to gravitate towards certain areas of the body. So this is something that

several types of leeches have to figure out. So there's a lot of leeches that feed on orifices. and that probably is because they have fewer teeth, and so it's harder to get through the skin, and they're looking for areas with thinner tissue and more blood vessels, so like inside mouths and up noses. And so that's probably what the hippo butt leech is doing, is that, you know, hippo skin is pretty tough. They can't bite through that,

so they're looking for an area that is softer, softer tissue that they can bite through. And unfortunately for the hippos, I would guess, I'm not sure their opinions on this, but... Yeah, it's softer in there, so that's what they're going for. What was the second part of your question? I've got distracted by a more important question. How did anybody discover this?

Were they looking for something else up the butt of a hippo, or tell us the story? Right. So hippos can be very dangerous. And so whoever discovered this, I don't remember who it was. But I guess they were looking for other things in the hippo rectums. I'm guessing it was a parasitologist. They lost their keys or something. They had a reason, I'm sure, and then they found a bunch of leeches.

For the species name, the species part that you said sounded like someone's last name. Is it someone's last name? Is that the person who found it? I don't know if it was the person who found it. Probably not, because when we name species after people, it's typically not the person describing it. So I don't know that person's association with that species, but it was in honor of someone. I would love to have a parasite named after me, but it hasn't happened yet.

One day, maybe I'll be that important. I'm not sure what this individual thought of having a hippo butt leech named after them. Kelly, it seems like the path is clear. You just got to look up the butts of lots of weird animals until you find your parasite. Well, but Anna just said that you usually don't get to name a species after you. You can name it after someone you know. So I need to become friends with the people who are checking animal butts. And I thought that I was doing a good job of becoming friends with the right kinds of people.

But it just hasn't happened yet. But I'm going to keep my fingers crossed. I am not in that group. Yeah, your friendship with me is not getting you any closer to that for sure. Well, you're going to name a particle after me, probably, right? The Wainer Smith particle? I hope so. I think there's a good chance, Kelly.

I think with your crowd, there's a good chance of this in the future. I'm hoping. Okay, so you're more likely to find leeches in highly vascularized, thin skin areas. And so I've seen leeches on, like, fish sides with scales. Like, do they have ways to get under the scales? I guess that's pretty easy to do. You just kind of move them aside? Yeah, they have very small mouths.

And also there's a lot of turtle leeches. And so, you know, turtles have scales. And then they also have their shells. But on the turtles, you know, they have different scutes and different plates on the shells. And the leeches go for the seams in between them. So they're not going to try and feed through the skew because it's keratinized. It's hard. But they'll go for the seams in between because they can get to the blood vessels easier there.

But with turtles especially, they're going for places where the turtle can't scratch them off. So it's going up like around the neck, behind the arms, underneath their legs. places that they can't either scratch them off or go find a tree or a rock to scrape them off. Okay, so I tell people I study parasites and they're like, well, that's gross. And then I try to get them excited by being

like, okay, I'm not going to change your mind about them being gross, that's fine. But like these tiny little sacks of fluid, they're able to figure out like where the soft parts of people are and they're able to find them. And like they do do all of these amazing things. They've like evolved these

anticoagulants that help them with their feeding. So when you tell people, I study leeches and they go, ugh, do you have like a speech that you give them to try to be like, okay, but they're gross but fascinating? Or are you just like, this is a lost cause? How do you try to turn people into leach fans? I think it depends on the individual. Okay. So I have definitely been at places when people realize what I do. They say, okay, you don't get to talk for the rest of the evening. And I go, it's not the best dinner conversation. But for people who are interested, I mean, I agree. like blood-sucking worms can be gross. I get it. I mean, that's just a reality that you have to face. But if we can admit that there's a cool side to it and that there's a lot that we can learn from leeches about their anticoagulants, about where they occur in nature, how they're associated with different vertebrate hosts, we can learn a lot from them. And that's, I think, the more important point, trying to appreciate them for what they're doing and that they're serving up an important role around our ecosystems that, hasn't always been recognized. Is the angle that usually works best, they're medicinally helpful and they're teaching us about anticoagulants?

I'm guessing that's the most convincing. Yeah, that's a strong point with leeches, also because they're commercially traded. Leashes have played an important role in conservation as well. So the Herodomodicinalis is the European medicinal leech. This was the leach that was collected the most in the 17-1800s for medicinal purposes and for bloodletting.

and this species was also one of the first species to have conservation measures put in place about its collecting. So in Germany, especially, in France, the number of leeches that were collected for bloodletting purposes was astronomical. There were millions of leeches collected and exported. And very quickly, the governments realized

that this is a huge number that needs to be tracked, not just for economic purposes, but then later, as they started tracking the populations, the natural populations is seeing that, oh, there's not as many leeches as you used to be. So they started putting regulations in place to say, you know, you can collect leeches,

but there's only so many you can export, and there's only so many that you can collect. Today, and actually the Herodomis and Alice is considered vulnerable because of the number of leashes that were collected back in the 17, 1800s. So those populations still have not recovered to this point. So today, the modern species

that is used in bloodletting is Herodovirbana, it's another species of Herodos that's found farther east in Europe. And that is the commercially traded leech. So today, if you say that you have Brudo and you're sending it to different places, one of the first things they want to ask is, is it Herodomis and Alice? Because we need to be careful about that because it's considered vulnerable, has a conservation status of being vulnerable, or is it Herodovirbana, and we need to track it because it's a commercially traded commodity.

So like when the Herudomitinalis, that was, I really rocked that. I'm sure I didn't. So when those numbers started to go down, did anything noticeable happen in the ecosystems? Like, were we able to identify that they had played an important role? And when they fall down, like maybe the animals that ate them, their numbers go down? Or was there nothing obvious at the time? I don't think anyone was looking at that necessarily. Yeah, I'm unaware of work on that.

A lot of people when they would study this, would look at the leeches themselves and not necessarily how it played roles in the ecosystems. But I think this is something about parasitology in general that we're realizing how much more important that is these days. Scientists are starting to include parasites in looking at ecosystem questions more so than ever has been in the past because they are connecting different trophic levels and different parts of the food web and parasites are doing a lot more in our ecosystems than I think we've ever recognized before, especially when you think you think about ecosystem decline and, you know, changing climate scenarios that parasites can be a

canary in the coal mine because they are connecting so many different points. And so when the parasites aren't able to make those connections, we can start to see perturbations and, you know, disturbances in these ecosystems and parasites long before we see the effect in the larger macrophana. So do you think parasites or leeches more specifically serve an essential and inevitable role in an ecosystem, you know, let me put it to you in a different context that maybe you've never been asked before. Say we land on an alien planet and we observe an alien ecosystem. Do you expect to find some form of leeches on that alien planet? Are there alien leeches, is my question. I like the possibility of alien leeches. I would definitely expect

there to be a parasite, or many parasites, probably. But I don't know if they would take the form of leeches necessarily the reason i say this is because parasitism is the most common life mode on the planet oh wow for eukaryotic organisms right yes yes of eukaryotic organisms it's ubiquitous as long as there have been organisms there's probably been something parasitizing it wow am i talking to the first astro parasitologists i think you may be the first astro parasologist there's so many cool parasites left to study here on earth when people are like, Kelly, would you move to Mars? And I'm like, there are still parasitic worms left to describe here, people. Why would anybody go to Mars? There's too much work to do. Yeah, it's daunting.

And there's not enough of us doing it. So, yeah, we got to pick up the pace. That's right. And I don't think the idea of getting sucked on by alien leeches is going to make somebody more likely to go to Mars or venture onto another planet. So it's not exactly doing a sales job. I mean, I think space is bad enough at selling space. it is, but I'm a bit biased, and I know lots of people who disagree with me. So, on that note, I have had so much fun. Thank you, Anna. Do you want to end by telling us what your favorite leeches? Oh, I have to pick just one. I know they're like children. How do you pick just one? I don't know. Exactly. I have a special affinity for the Macrovedella leeches in North America.

Macro because they're large in Bedella is a name for leech. They're big. They're brightly colored. and since they're all of green with orange polka dots. And, I mean, big is that there's several inches and a lot of people encounter them. And they're pretty. It was one of the first groups that I studied as an intern long ago, so still hold a special place in my heart.

They sound wonderful. And I bet a lot of our listeners have encountered them and maybe they'll appreciate them more now. I hope so. All right. Thanks, Anna. Daniel and Kelly is extraordinary, universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know

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My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up.

Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation

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