I saw something while I was driving, but not sure what it was.
Another slow day and damn was it hot!
Quick question for
@Cabezon
I was checking to see what time it was and my fly floated down to the bottom which resulted in a sculpin eating it. I noticed a small thin back worm type critter attached to it while unhooking it.
Whatever it is it wiggled quite a bit and moved pretty quickly along the fish’s body.
Sorry for the less than stellar macros, but what could this be, some type of parasite?
Thanks
SF
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Hi SF,
That appears to be a marine leach. Like freshwater leaches, they have sucking disks at both ends to adhere to their target. They can break through the skin, inject an anti-coagulant in their saliva, and slurp up blood,
Leptocottus blood in this case.
Fun
rolleyes
leach story. In 2014, I and another professor took a group of college students for a 20+ day exploration of Cambodia. In addition to Angkor Wat
and the classic Cambodian temples like Angkor Thom,
we included two overnight treks through the jungle. On one trek, that included sleeping in surplus Vietnam-era hammocks with mosquito netting (malarial mosquitoes...),
the trek started dry, but then it began to drizzle. That turned dirt trails up and down the hills into muddy ice-skating rinks. The the moisture activated in the terrestrial leaches of the jungle (see brown, pseudo-segmented thing in this picture).
They can sense (motion, temperature) passing animals. They climb up on grasses and twigs and suck onto you as you walk by. The leach then keep climbing, even underneath pant legs, until they can find a patch of open skin. Then, they start to gorge on you. So, in the night with it still drizzling, I have to climb out of my hammock and pee. Back in the hammock, I can feel something on my leg. Panic, chaos, a f$(#ing leach. I find it by flashlight and flick it out of the hammock (I hope...). On the second miserable trek in the rain (monsoon season),
[The rain, humidity, and terrain were not meant for a fat guy. The guides would be bounding along the trails and I would be lagging at the rear. The guides wanted to press on, but I reminded them that if I collapsed from heat exhaustion, they would have to carry my fat ass out...]
we would regularly stop every half-hour or so for a mutual leach check. Still, one of the b@st@rds managed to glom onto my belly. I found it when we were able to shower at the end of that day's hike. That one got beat to a pulp...
Steve
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