Getting Back To My Blog “ Leeches In My Pond”......
By loosestrife2
6 comments
In my blog of July 14 I thought that I had discovered leeches in my pond. My task was to determine which type they were. Were they the bloodsucking type or the type that feed on decayed pond material? I had a setback in that quest in that I had a bout with “Bells Palsy” which is an inflammation of either the right or left facial nerve causing paralysis of the facial muscles on the affected side. In my case it was the right side of my face.This was remedied by an ASAP dose of Prednisone for a number of days so my appearance no longer makes children cringe in fear or cause dogs to bark. Back to completing my inquiry. My lab is on the third floor of my home and in this horrible hot and humid weather it was
quite warm so I decided to set up a secondary lab in the kitchen to identify these critters. My liver trap had no customers so I know there were no blood suckers in the pond. I collected some debris with what appeared to be leeches in it. This debris was placed in a mini aquarium I constructed which was made from a plastic Petri dish placed on end and my view of its contents was a WiFi microscope capable of 50x-1000×. This kitchen bio-lab setup you see in this photo
What I saw in this mini-pond were no leeches at all but the good old cross eyed Planarian which everyone taking biology 101 becomes familiar with. Must be thousands of them in my pond. It’s food source are small worms and pond Arthropoda so my fish are safe and well fed eating these Planaria. What follows are some photos taken with my scope. They were scooting around rather quickly so a few images might be blurred but you can still make out the “ cross eyed “ feature.
11 Aug, 2018
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Comments
A sad state of affairs SB. One of the things Planaria taught us was that two heads were better than one.
11 Aug, 2018
How big are they? At this magnification they certainly don't look like veg eating leeches. We had a sink full of those once(don't ask) - the only household crisis i was unable to deal with as they began to climb out onto the draining board- leeches are my very unfavourite thing... Must be a great relief to you.
11 Aug, 2018
I would say Stera that the largest in my sample was 5-6 mm though the largest they get up to at rest is about 10 to 12mm. I say “at rest” because when they are swimming or moving quickly they can elongate themselves to larger lengths. Even though I was not able to find blood sucking leeches in my liver bait there certainly must be some in my pond but very few in numbers which certainly is a great relief to me.
11 Aug, 2018
I have never seen these before, so was fascinated. Thank you! :) There are some very clever folk in our community :)
12 Aug, 2018
Fascinating L'strife although I'm not sure as to how I would react with them, I will be content reading your blogs not looking too closely in my pond ..I know I'm a right wuss, lol.....
13 Aug, 2018
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they used to be areas of study in some of our A-level syllabuses but were removed in the early 80's. I think that is a shame as they are such interesting animals.
they are very good swimmers aren't they.
11 Aug, 2018