As part of a Putnam Expedition grant from Harvard University, I set out with a team of researchers (Alejandro Oceguera-Figueroa and Jossue Jiménez-Armenta of UNAM and Michael Tessler of the AMNH) to find shark-feeding piscicolid leeches. We solicited fishermen active in the Gulf of Mexico to retrieve leeches form their catch and visited local markets and fish mongers. We eventually managed to retrieve two different species of leeches and, by sequencing the DNA inside the blood meal, we were able to determine that these were indeed shark leeches. The results of the study were recently published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society (see Publications above).

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