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FeasonさんはTwitterを使っています 「CRT TV https://t.co/r0qADKWaxt」 / Twitter
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Simon Stålenhag - http://www.simonstalenhag.se/
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labs that are also churches. to me
(1. annie dillard, teaching a stone to talk 2. the deep underground neutrino experiment, a.k.a. DUNE 3. the large hadron collider 4. the sudbury neutrino observatory)
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Hey- I’m sorta scared of leeches- they make me feel very angry very quickly but I’m trying to get over it. Can you tell me some cool/cute facts about leeches to aid me in this endeavour? If u don’t feel like it that’s also all g
Yeah!
Many people think of leeches as being black, but it's only because they look black under harsh white lighting. The leeches traditionally used in medicine were always one of these two colorful species!
Medicinalis became so overharvested it nearly went extinct in the wild, and today it's heavily protected. Leeches are still used by many hospitals, but now they rely on captive farmed verbana. They're still the most painless and effective way to drain blood that's gotten "trapped" post-surgery, which can otherwise lead to severe complications. Sadly, because a used leech presents the same issue as a used needle, they're incinerated after one job (high enough heat that the death is instantaneous, at least) though there are a few cases where a patient was allowed to keep their leech when they asked. Probably varies with the hospital's policy, but it's really something that a little tiny worm can save someone's life and that person might decide to keep feeding it.
They can actually live up to a decade or more!
There are also leeches in the ocean which get especially vibrant!
Almost all leeches have a sucker at each end of their body, the rear one just used for walking around and hanging on to things. It's also the smaller, pointier end that's the head end! These fish leeches aren't even biting the fish; those are their butts! They're probably done feeding and just going for a ride now.
Leeches have little eyes, sometimes just two to four, though many species have dozens of them. Some have eyes all along their bodies or clusters at both ends!
Most species of leech don't drink blood, but prey on other invertebrates, and some groups feed by just swallowing prey whole like a snake. This is a rare giant orange mountain leech that primarily feeds on a giant purpleish mountain earthworm.
The leeches that do feed on blood tend to specialize in either birds and mammals or fish, amphibians and reptiles, this one is a turtle leech! Blood-feeding leeches only need to eat every few weeks or months and can go a year or more.
Leeches don't have rings of fangs like a lamprey (which is a kind of fish) but three jaws, each with a row of microscopic saw-like teeth. These actually bite as gently as possible, softly scratching the skin only just deep enough to get any blood. When you get a tiny scratch that barely hurts but does turn a little red, that's how shallow a leech's bite typically is.
The problem is just that their natural anticoagulants are SO strong, that little scratch will bleed as if it's a serious wound. Not enough to be dangerous (unless you were bitten by thousands of them at once) but enough to seem really scary. That's why they're still so much better at bloodletting than any man-made invention to date!
Unlike ticks or mosquitoes, there aren't any diseases that use leeches as a vehicle, so the only danger is in the bite taking on a bacterial infection, like any cut or scrape, but especially a cut or scrape you possibly sustained in the middle of a swamp.
Since a leech injects its anticoagulants the moment it makes that tiny cut though, the maximum damage has already been done by the time you find an attached leech, and the safest way to remove one is simply to let it feed until it drops off after fifteen to thirty minutes.
If you do need to remove one, all you have to do is push your fingernail under the edge of the mouth sucker. Lots of blood will come out, but again just because of the anticoagulants; the jaws and teeth are only used to make the initial wound, and it's nothing but the suction cup holding them in place!
Leeches, vampire bats, mosquitoes and many other blood feeders actually aren't thought of as "parasites," because they don't inhabit the bodies of their hosts, with the exception of a few really weird leeches. Instead the term "micropredator" was coined some years back.
These animals serve similar ecological functions to true predators in that they help recirculate nutrients that larger, longer-lived animals are basically hoarding to themselves. When a leech takes your blood, it's returning some of your energy back to the nutrient cycle as soon as it excretes waste, gets eaten by a fish, or finally passes on and just decomposes, turning some of your blood into more fish and frogs and dragonflies and plant life!
It's like us giant mammals are nature's billionaires in terms of how much sustenance we utilize, and a vampire bat or a leech basically comes by to collect a little tax now and then, whereas a wolf or a tiger just goes straight to giving you the guillotine.
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if you dont get off of the computer its going to be scary
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