Let the “Eeeewwws” begin. The BBC has reported that a new species of blood-sucking leech has been discovered in Perú by an international team of scientists. The creature lives in the remote parts of the Upper Amazon and has a “particularly unpleasant habit of infesting humans,” the scientists say.
This parasitic beast — which scientists have dubbed “Tyrannobdella rex” or tyrant leech king — is known for its admittedly stomach churning penchant for entering the body orifices of human beings and animals and attaching itself to their mucous membranes.
The creature was first discovered in 2007 in Perú when a specimen was plucked from the nose of a girl who had been bathing in a river. Dr. Renzo Arauco-Brown, from the School of Medicine at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, was the medical doctor who extracted the leech and preserved sent it a zoologist in the US.
Zoologist, Dr Mark Siddall, from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was quick to recognize it as a new species. He said it had some very unusual features, including just one single jaw, eight very large teeth and extremely small genitalia — (no jokes please.)
Anna Phillips, a graduate student affiliated with the museum who led the team of researchers who studied the leech’s features and DNA, described the creature:
“We think that Tyrannobdella rex is most closely related to another leech that gets into the mouths of livestock in Mexico… the leech could feed on aquatic mammals, from their noses and mouths for example, where they could stay for weeks at a time.”
The DNA analysis also revealed “evolutionary relationships” between leeches that now inhabit distant regions. This suggested that a common ancestor of this group may have lived when the continents were pressed together into a single land mass or super-continent called Pangaea. Dr Siddall explained:
“The earliest species in this family of leeches no doubt shared an environment with dinosaurs about 200 million years ago. Some ancestor of our T. rex may have been up that other T. rex’s nose.”
Although around 600 to 700 species leeches have been described, scientists believe there could be as many as 10,000 species throughout the world in marine, terrestrial and fresh water environments. The team of scientists published their study of this animal in in the Public Library of Science. The “clinical presentations” are not for the faint-of-heart. From PLoS:
“Unlike any other leech previously described, this new taxon has but a single jaw with very large teeth… this new species, found feeding from the upper respiratory tract of humans in Perú, clarifies an expansion of the family Praobdellidae to include the new species Tyrannobdella rex n. gen. n.sp… moreover, the results clarify a single evolutionary origin of a group of leeches that specializes on mucous membranes, thus, posing a distinct threat to human health.”
