Leech found in Salem County may be scientific breakthrough

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Not directly related to the pines, but still interesting.

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Leech found in Salem County may be scientific breakthrough


Monday, October 4, 2004

By KIM MULFORD
Courier-Post Staff
ALLOWAY
Bill Ott thought he found a little black snake.

He had no idea the creature wriggling in his hands might be an undiscovered species.

Ott was mowing the lawn on a hot sunny Saturday morning in July 2003 when he noticed a 10-inch-long creature winding along a pebble-pocked dirt channel.

He scooped it up and thought it looked more like a really weird worm.

Ott took it up to the house to show his wife, Carol, who always took care of the snakes, turtles, rabbits and other creatures her husband and their 16-year-old son brought home.

When she saw the segmented ink-black thing twisting through her husband's hands, she put it in a glass bowl with rocks and water. Then she identified it as a leech.

But it was nothing like the leeches she used to pull off her legs after swimming in the local pond.

One difference was its size. When stretched out, it was about a foot long, with a sucker on one end and a pointy head on the other.

And unlike other leeches, it didn't like water.


She spent days trying to learn more about it, losing sleep over it and worrying whether she could keep it alive.

Thinking it was a blood-sucker, she bought a baby mouse for it. When the leech ignored it, she put in some earthworms. They were gone in a half-hour.

"It was so cool," said Carol Ott, a 51-year-old secretary.

The Otts' leech is more than just cool, said Dan Shain, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers-Camden and one of the few leech experts in the country.

Shain said he believes it might be a new species of Haemopis, a North American terrestrial leech.

Most leeches are aquatic. The much-rarer terrestrial variety usually live in the tropics. Until now, the only North American terrestrial leech could be found mostly in the Midwest, South and Southeast.

When Carol found Shain on the Internet and e-mailed him about her discovery, he didn't believe it.

"I thought two things," Shain said. "That Carol was just making it up or that her neighbor had gotten an exotic pet and it had escaped."

When Carol Ott then took the leech to Shain's house, the laid-back scientist from Berkeley, Calif., was quite excited by what she delivered to his door.

Shain goes on expeditions across the world to find leeches, takes students to muck around local ponds collecting specimens and recently won a $425,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study the cocoons of leeches.

But he had never seen anything like this.

"This is one of the biggest leeches found in North America, period," Shain said.

If only they could find another one.

Leeches are related to worms; they are hermaphroditic, with both male and female reproductive organs.

After a year living in the lap of luxury in Shain's lab, Piwi - as he is affectionately called - has yet to reproduce. Last year, Piwi made two egg cases but there was nothing inside.

Without a mate for Piwi, there is little that can be done to learn more about him. A second leech would mean a colony could be grown and allow Shain to dissect the creature and conduct a DNA analysis.

"I'm actually quite desperate to find another one," Shain said.

Without more specimens, it can't be determined whether this is a new species, said Mark J. Wetzel, a research scientist with the Illinois Natural History Survey's Center for Biodiversity in Champaign, Ill.

Shain called Wetzel to ask about the Otts' discovery.

Wetzel is curator of a collection of worms that includes the only known terrestrial leech in North America, the Haemopis terrestris. That leech is gray with black and yellow markings.

Wetzel described Shain as a good scientist who wouldn't identify something as possibly being a new species unless Shain really thought it was.

If it is a new species, Wetzel said, that's of high interest to scientists who work with annelids.

"He was hoping to find more," Wetzel said. "I wished him good hunting."

Piwi is treated like a king. His water, a saline solution, is changed every few days.

Piwi also lives at room temperature in his own tank rather than in a refrigerator with hundreds of other leeches Shain stores. That's because Shain isn't sure how Piwi would respond to lower temperatures.

Piwi also is fed a fat, hand-picked earthworm every other week.

Shain, who uses latex gloves when handling Piwi so he won't get sick, has made observations even with just a single specimen.

For one thing, Piwi has very sharp teeth and can be downright barbaric when it comes to eating.

"If you put a worm in there, he'll just suck it down whole or other times cut them up. It's rather disgusting," Shain said. "Sometimes, he pulls them apart."

For now, Piwi is a side project for Shain.

He took a group of students to the Otts' back yard earlier this summer but had no success.

What he really needs are more people like Bill and Carol Ott - people who will deliver a foot-long leech to a scientist instead of squashing it. He suggests looking in the middle of a warm rainy night.

Out of habit now, the Otts always keep an eye out for another one.

"I hope we can find a mate for it," Carol said. "I hope it's an important discovery to science."
 
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