

While unquestionably grotesque, leeches tend to be rather benign creatures. They latch onto a host, gorge themselves on blood and fall off of their own accord – a little disgusting but nothing to worry about.

Of course, there are leech species that have adapted to feed on mucous membranes and that have a preference for bodily orifices; the newly discovered “T-Rex” leech, is one of those. The leech was named Tyrannobdella rex (tyrant leech king) for its spectacular choppers, which stand 130 microns high and are slightly wider than a human hair.

The leech species was initially discovered in 1997 but forgotten. Science Daily reports that it came to the attention of Mark Siddall, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, when Dr. Renzo Arauco-Brown, a Peruvian medical doctor from the School of Medicine at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima sent him a specimen that he had collected from the nose of a nine-year-old girl who frequented the lakes and rivers of Peru’s Amazon region. Further research by Siddall uncovered two forgotten specimens from 1997.

T-Rex seems to have adapted to feed from bodily orifices. Alejandro Oceguera-Figueroa, Siddall’s student, described it as having “a single jaw with eight very large teeth, and extremely small genitalia.”

Siddall noted:

That’s at least five times as high as other leeches. And everyone found with these had a frontal headache. Their teeth are big and these things hurt.

Regarding the choice of name, Siddall told Science Daily:

We named it Tyrannobdella rex because of its enormous teeth. Besides, the earliest species in this family of these leeches no-doubt shared an environment with dinosaurs about 200 million years ago when some ancestor of our T. rex may have been up that other T. rex’s nose.

In his PLoS ONE article, Siddall concluded that T. rex posed a very real threat to the health of people in the western Amazonian region:

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., along with others in the genera Dinobdella, Myxobdella, Praobdella and Pintobdella. 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.

Images

Top, a stereomicrograph of T-Rex’s impressive teeth; Bottom, T-Rex.

Sources

[PLoS ONE (full article and images); Science Daily]