The New T. Rex: A Leech With an Affinity for Noses

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2010) — The new T. rex has ferociously large teeth lining a single jaw. But its length is less than 2 inches. Tyrannobdella rex, which means tyrant leech king, is a new species of blood sucker that lives in the remote parts of the Upper Amazon. Although its regular host remains unknown, it was discovered three years ago in Perú when a 44.5 millimeter leech was plucked from the nose of a girl who had recently been bathing in a river.


The new species, described in PLoS ONE, has led to revising the group of leeches that has a habit of feeding from body orifices of mammals.

"Because of our analysis of morphology and DNA, we think that Tyrannobdella rex is most closely related to another leech that gets into the mouths of livestock in Mexico," says Anna Phillips, a graduate student affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and the first author of the paper. "We think the leech could feed on aquatic mammals, from their noses and mouths for example, where they could stay for weeks at a time."

Discoveries of new leech species are not uncommon occurrences. Although there are 600 to 700 species of described leeches, it is thought that there could be as many as10,000 species throughout the world in marine, terrestrial and fresh water environments. Tyrannobdella rex was first brought to the attention of Mark Siddall, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the Museum, when he received a specimen collected by Dr. Renzo Arauco-Brown, a Peruvian medical doctor from the School of Medicine at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima who was working at a clinic in Chanchamayo province. Siddall immediately recognized it as a new species. His student Alejandro Oceguera-Figueroa described its weird morphology -- a single jaw with eight very large teeth, and extremely small genitalia. Two earlier cases from 1997 were re-discovered from different clinics in the western Amazon, one from Lamas province and the other from Yochegua province.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100414184205.htm

[xchrom]

1. This scores a perfect 10 in the EWW category. Nt

[eppur_se_muova]

2. "has a habit of feeding from body orifices ... eight teeth ... extremely small genitalia ..."

That sounds familiar somehow !