Katie Walsh is a writer from Massachusetts. A New Species of Leech Is Discovered Near Washington, D.C. He shuffles into his bedroom, and I gather up the discarded electrodes, now a handful of white petals, and throw them away. I smooth his messy hair down over his scalp. I help him pull his shirt back on it’s cold in the room. When I’m done, there are little red circles dotted across his skin, like an octopus has been draped around his shoulders. The medicinal leech has a cylindrical, dorsoventrally flattened body divided into thirty-three or thirty-four segments. I move onto the next, orbiting him, dropping them one by one onto the ottoman, stupid, stubborn scraps of medical waste.
Leech teeth skin#
I start to peel the edge back, stopping when he flinches to swab again, peel again, murmuring “Almost, almost,” until the electrode finally lifts away. When the leech bites, it makes a Y-shaped incision in the skin with three curved jaws covered in serrated teeth like tiny circular saws, and then extracts blood with a muscular sucking action. Although its less than 2 inches in length, I think. I grab some alcohol wipes from the bathroom and begin swabbing around the outside of an electrode, trying to weaken the adhesive that’s pulling painfully on his skin and hair. Named Tyrannobdella rex, which means 'tyrant leech king,' the new species of blood sucker sports its 'ferociously large teeth' in a single jaw. Now eager to get rid of them, he removes his shirt, standing skinny in the middle of his living room in his gray sweatpants, plucking at the small circles, pale leeches scattered across his chest. The confusion makes him this way, irritable and impatient. He says that it hurt too much when the nurse tried to remove them, so he told her to forget it. The jaws make a Y-shaped cut into the victims skin. Leeches are thought to have evolved from certain oligochaete worms however, the systematics and taxonomy of leeches are in need of review.
Inside the sucker there are three jaws lined with sharp teeth. Leech classification is primarily based on the presence or absence of setae (bristles) and the morphology of the mouth, proboscis (feeding organ), jaws, and suckers. When we get home from the hospital, I realize the electrodes are still stuck to my father’s chest and back. The leech has a small sucker on its head.
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