I’m going to be posting my blogroll to my new digs as soon as I get the chance. And to that list I will be adding BdellaNea. It’s the work of Mark Siddall, a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History who specializes in leeches.
I wrote about Mark in this 2006 article for the New York Times, and last weekend at the meeting of the American Society for Parasitologists we caught up briefly. He’d been off to Zambia and various other seething leech hot spots since I’d last seen him, and at the meeting he and his students were presenting lots of new research, including some insights into how different species of leeches thin your blood.
Just a couple days later, on Wednesday, Siddall launched his blog with an impressive six posts by the afternoon–including Demi Moore waxing poetic about leeches on her navel.
This is why the Internet was invented.
Originally published July 3, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.