![]() ![]() You’re never going to escape them, so you might as well learn to appreciate them. Not quite a romantic weekend in Niagara Falls, but it does the trick. Instead, leeches line themselves up, head to feet-or as close as a leech gets to a head, or feet-and trade sperm packets. Leeches have both male and female reproductive organs, but that doesn’t mean they can do it all themselves, fertilization-wise. But hey-a meal’s a meal, and if someone’s ankle presents itself, it’s nom time. Even those that do drink blood aren’t actively looking for human blood-they prefer frogs, snails, turtles, and other aquatic creatures. Many freshwater leeches, in fact, don’t eat blood at all-they’re carnivores, but they stick to molluscs, insect larvae, and worms. But, like earthworms, leeches make great bait, especially for walleye.īlood-eating leeches are only one type, although they’re the ones we most often notice, mostly as we’re dancing around trying to rip them off our legs. Plus, there’s that whole bloodsucking thing. Leeches’ bodies are much more solid than earthworms’, and while they show some external segmentation, the divisions on the outside don’t match up with how organs are arranged on the inside. ![]() Leeches have a lot in common with your everyday earthworm-but there are some important differences. Here are a few things you might not have know about these creepy crawlies. They get a bad reputation for being nothing but slimy, oozy, hysterics-worthy bloodsuckers-and while they may be all those things, leeches are actually pretty cool once you get to know them.įrom a distance. The work presented here provides us with clear information to take further steps in resolving the taxonomy and systematics of African freshwater fish trypanosomes.Poor leeches. tricarinata supports its status as the vector and the molecular evidence shows the relationship between the trypanosome in the fish and leech, but also illustrates the exceptional genetic and morphological diversity of a single species of trypanosome between host species. Developmental stages of the trypanosome found in the leech B. From morphological and molecular data presented here, it is clear that the trypanosomes from Phongolo are closely related to those of the Okavango and should be considered as a single diverse species with genetic differentiation between 0.4–2.9%, under the 3–5% differences expected to be seen between true distinct species within the rRNA. Sequence data showed that the trypanosome from one of the leeches, identified as Batracobdelloides tricarinata (Blanchard, 1897), was highly similar to those obtained from the plain squeaker, Synodontis zambezensis, with 0.7% difference recorded between them. Trypanosomes were detected in the fish families Cichlidae, Clariidae, Mochokidae and Schilbeidae. To determine whether trypanosome stages in fishes and leeches were of the same genotype, DNA was extracted and fragments of the 18S rDNA gene were amplified and sequenced. To locate trypanosome stages, leeches were removed from fishes captured in the Phongolo River, South Africa, and fish blood films and leech squashes were Giemsa-stained and screened. The aims of the present study were thus to elucidate the life cycle of a freshwater fish trypanosome from southern Africa and to do a morphological and molecular characterization of this parasite from both the fish host and leech vector. Recently, results from a molecular analysis of fish trypanosomes from the Okavango Delta, Botswana, reported the presence of at least two genotypic groups and concluded that the identification of T. This number was later reduced to six and in the late 1990s it was proposed that most records of freshwater fish trypanosomes across Africa are Trypanosoma mukasai Hoare, 1932. Trypanosomes are ubiquitous blood parasites of fishes and at least 16 species were originally described infecting African freshwater fishes. ![]()
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