This was my first experience collecting leeches in Canada and what better place to go to then “Leech Central”, Algonquin Park, ON. The focal species for the trip was Placobdella parasitica, which proved a lot harder to find than initially thought. With the aid of Matt Keevil, we were able to recover a few specimens from turtles, mainly red-eared sliders and snapping turtles. The specimens were used in a phylogenomic study that also aimed at investigating the genomic makeup of the bacterial symbiont within the leech. The results were published in 2011 in PLoS ONE (see Publications above).