Inna Horosheva - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purposes only, not the actual leech
Can leeches really jump? We hate to tell you this, but yes, they can. The parasites have been caught on video, leaping from leaf to leaf in the rainforest of Madagascar, Africa.
Leeches are already creepy enough. They lurk in warm, slow-moving waters and drink blood. Now, they can jump? It’s the stuff of nightmares.
The discovery was made in 2017. A researcher named Mai Fahmy at the American Museum of Natural History and Fordham University in New York captured footage of a jumping land-dwelling leech while she was in Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park. Fahmy had been collecting leeches for bloodmeal analysis at the time when she spotted the leech.
The leech had been stretching out its body in search of a host to latch on to, which is a behavior known as “questing.” In the video, the leech can be seen inching forward on a leaf. When it reached the edge of the leaf, its body coiled back, resembling the way a cobra prepares to strike at prey.
Then, it sprang off the leaf and landed on the forest floor. The process seemed to help the leech build up energy. The video provided evidence that terrestrial parasites, including the species Chtonobdella fallax, jump to look for blood to feed on.
A second clip shows two leeches side by side on a leaf. One of them plopped down to the ground. The creatures in the videos were a type of Chtonobdella leech.
Jumping behavior in leeches was even documented by the 14th-century explorer Ibn Battuta in Sri Lanka. In the 1880s, a biologist named Ernst Haeckel claimed that leeches jump to reach their victims. However, by the mid-20th century, scientists were skeptical of the idea of jumping leeches.
“For hundreds of years, there were anecdotes from really extremely well-trained observers about jumping leeches,” Michael Tessler, an invertebrate zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History and Medger Evers College in New York, said.
“It wasn’t until people started more seriously studying leeches, kind of in the 1800s, early 1900s, that almost every leech biologist who spent time with these things said, ‘no way they can’t jump.'”
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