Leeches expose wildlife’s whereabouts and may aid conservation efforts
DNA extracted from the parasitic worms’ blood meals lets scientists track where animals roam
By Nikk Ogasa
Leeches suck. Most people try to avoid them. But in the summer of 2016, park rangers in China’s Ailaoshan Nature Reserve went hunting for the little blood gluttons.
For months, the rangers searched through the reserve’s evergreen forest, gathering tens of thousands of leeches by hand and sometimes plucking the slimy parasites from the rangers’ own skin. Each time the rangers found a leech, they would place it into a little, preservative-filled tube, tuck the tube into a hip pack and carry on. The work could help aid conservation efforts, at Ailaoshan and elsewhere.
There are many ways to measure how much effort goes into wildlife conservation, but it’s difficult to assess the success of that effort, even in protected areas, says Douglas Yu, an ecologist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China.