Each leech can consume about 5 to 10 ml of blood at each feeding, almost 10 times its own weight. They have three jaws and a hundred teeth. As they bite, they inject an anaesthetic into the skin and their saliva contains anticoagulants which stop the blood clotting
Leeches only feed about once every six months, this is about how long the blood meal takes to be fully digested. Certain bacteria keep the blood from decaying during the long digestion period.
yim yum. also better than actual landlords
Landlords feed every month and they don't even give out any anaesthetic!
landlords: they make literal parasites look benign.
lol thats not enough to notice it's missing. id probably feed the leech too if i could trust it wasn't carrying any diseases or anything
Whoa, that bacteria tho. What if we could cultivate a benign strain to act as a preservative in medical blood supplies?