Video: New Medicinal Leech Species (VIDEO)
Caption
An international team of museum scientists led by Anna Phillips, the Smithsonian's curator of parasitic worms, describe Macrobdella mimicus, the first new species of medicinal leech discovered in over 40 years, in the Aug. 15 issue of the Journal of Parasitology. Phillips and her colleagues have been exploring the diversity of medicinal leeches in North America for years. When she returned to the National Museum of Natural History from a 2015 field expedition with several orange-spotted, olive-green leech specimens she had collected from a Maryland swamp, she and her team assumed they belonged to a familiar species called M. decora, a leech that is thought to live throughout a large swath of the northern United States. But DNA sequencing revealed it was a new species.
Credit
Ian Cook
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