This was our first trip to Lake Vermillion to find the notorious North American medicinal leech, Macrobdella decora. Lake Vermillion is the type locality of the species and it was therefore of utmost import to find the leech in this surrounding. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find this specific leech but we did recover other diversity – mainly species of the genera Helobdella, Glossiphonia, Placobdella and Erpobdella. Because of the lack of Macrobdella in Lake Vermillion, we ventured southwest to approach the westernmost boundary of its distribution under the assumption that this would yield the highest genetic dissimilarity. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the leech in Nebraska either. We returned to Lake Vermillion in May 2016, (see above) and managed to recover the leech.