Meet the leech, the misunderstood hero of aquatic ecosystems all over the world, who does not always suck blood!

How do leeches find their hosts? We explore how leeches sense heat, chemicals, and movements in their environments.

As we tidy away the Dracula capes and glow-in-the-dark plastic fangs for another winter, one notorious blood sucker has had a particularly good year. For the first time the medicinal leech Hirudo ...

The Wisconsin site is famed for its preservation of ancient soft-bodied organisms like leeches—leading Kenneth Gass, a ...

Learn about a 480-million-year-old leech fossil that revealed that ancient leeches didn’t have the biological components necessary to suck blood. Stephanie Edwards is the marketing coordinator at ...

A newly described fossil reveals that leeches are at least 200 million years older than scientists previously thought, and ...

Saving the graft was critical so the medical team proposed a treatment that surprised Lofgreen: leeches. “I was absolutely floored,” says the 31-year-old Idaho resident. “My initial reaction was, Okay ...

A new video shows what appears to be the first evidence of jumping land-dwelling leeches in Madagascar, Africa. It was taken in 2017 by Mai Fahmy, who posted about the findings on Instagram on ...

For centuries, observers have told tales of leeches leaping through the air in pursuit of their next meal—with written records of the creatures’ gravity-defying feats dating as far back as the 14th ...

White men can’t jump, but terrestrial leeches can. This is now a scientific fact; after centuries of anecdotal reports, the parasites have been caught on video leaping from leaves in the Madagascan ...

For decades, scientists have posed one interesting question about leeches—can they jump? While the idea of jumping leeches might sound like it's only the stuff of nightmares—I still can't forget those ...