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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 ...
Well-known Haemadipsidae are for example the Indian Leech (Haemadipsa sylvestris) and the yamabiru or Japanese Mountain Leech (Haemadipsa zeylanica). Members of the family feed on blood, except Idiobdella which has adapted to eat small snails. [1] The other notable group of jawed blood-sucking leeches are the aquatic Hirudinidae.
Hirudo verbana feeds on blood (hematophagy). During a blood meal, a leech rhythmically contracts its muscles to draw blood from a host animal into the crop for storage. It can consume over five times its own weight in blood in one feeding. Once satiated, a leech detaches from its host.
Hematophagy (sometimes spelled haematophagy or hematophagia) is the practice by certain animals of feeding on blood (from the Greek words αἷμα haima "blood" and φαγεῖν phagein "to eat"). Since blood is a fluid tissue rich in nutritious proteins and lipids that can be taken without great effort, hematophagy is a preferred form of ...
A rare breed of blood-sucking leech is being bred at London Zoo in a bid to save the UK’s largest native leech species from extinction. The medicinal leech was once widespread in Britain, but ...
This leech is unique in that the adult attaches to the host but does not itself feed on it; instead, the young that it was brooding transfer to the host to take their first blood meal. [ 3 ] References
In medieval and early modern European medicine, the medicinal leech (Hirudo medicinalis and its congeners H. verbana, H. troctina, and H. orientalis) was used to remove blood from a patient as part of a process to balance the humors that, according to Galen, must be kept in balance for the human body to function properly.
Glossiphoniidae are a family of freshwater proboscis-bearing leeches. These leeches are generally flattened, and have a poorly defined anterior sucker . Most suck the blood of freshwater vertebrates like amphibians , crocodilians and aquatic turtles , but some feed on invertebrates like oligochaetes and freshwater snails instead.