I Hate Bugs #3: Rainforest Leeches

Aaaand we’re back to the tropics again to look at a creature out of my worst nightmares.  I realize leeches are far, far removed from insects (they’re in the same class as earthworms) and no one in their right mind would really call them “bugs” outside a Calvin & Hobbes comic strip.  But for me, they tap into the same level of ohmygoditchygetitoff as something like venomous snakes and wasps, so I’m going to include them here.

POW!  Did that scare you?  Because that's how I feel about leeches!

Now, there is not much out there that genuinely scares the pants off me.  Snakes and sharks, to be sure, but after that I have the fear capacity of an Ikea desk.  Planes, traffic, spiders, pathogens, Sarah Palin, and needles are things I don’t adore but certainly don’t evoke visceral terror for me.  But leeches.  Oh God, leeches.  They really do writhe around like wormy zombies in my own private version of hell.

And so, if you ever need to break me during interrogation, my secret is out.

Something about things that are so wobbly and wiggly and drink blood.  Gahhh.  It makes me itch and squirm just thinking about them.

This is what a leech’s mouth looks like:

And when you recover from that, here are some leeches eating someone and getting exorbitantly fat:

Do you understand my position here?  There is not a single level on which my brain does not recoil at these creatures.  Once they bite you, they’ll ingest up to ten times their own body weight in blood, then drop off in an engorged state of obesity.   They are really really really fucking gross.

The worst leech experience I’ve had was in Australia, climbing Mt. Bartle Frere with my friend Terri.  

This is how I used to feel about hiking.  DESTROYED.

We set off into the jungly hillside, following a muddy trail up as the rainforest got darker and darker, until we stopped for a drink of water—at which point we realized something was... kind of tickly. 

By the time we noticed something weird, there were dozens of wormy things marching up our boots and legs, and more of them already latched up and curled up for a long feast.

In horror, I brushed them off my boots first and felt their little mucusy bodies mushing under my fingers.  Ewwww.  Then I tried to brush them off my legs AND THEY HUNG ON.  I had to actually grasp, pull, and stretch out their bodies before they’d let go of my skin, which would then be left with a bleeding hole.  And by the time I’d gotten them all off, more were marching up my boot.  I won’t lie, I was practically having a heart attack at this point.

And that’s when I discovered them INSIDE my boots.  See, I wear thin socks to fit my hiking boots, and they had crawled over the ankles of the boots and down into the hollows on either side of my Achilles tendon.

There they had curled up, bitten through my sock, and made themselves comfortable—in a pile of a dozen leeches per ankle.  That meant that as soon as I pulled at my sock, they were all dislodged—which was great!—and the skin on my ankle was demolished—which was not great.  It bled like hell and it itched like hell.  

At this point I was more or less having a complete psychological meltdown.

And now, my personal sanity scatters like birdshot.

Unfortunately, neither Terri nor I had thought to bring any kind of bug spray, so the only thing we could think to do was to smear sunscreen all over our boots to try to repel them.

Pictured: Not an effective leech repellent.

It didn’t work—a minute later there was an army of leeches marching up through our SPF 15.

They crawled out of every speck of dirt and leaf litter around—and remember that we were in a damn rainforest, so there was nowhere to hide.  I remember finding a 6 x 6 inch patch of bare rock to stand on with one foot to avoid being chewed while Terri tied a shoelace.

The only thing we could think to do to avoid them was run.  And run we did—we bolted up that mountain faster than I have ever hiked anywhere, until finally we reached an altitude where the rainforest was a bit drier and the leeches had vanished.  My onrushing schizophrenic hell receded into the background and we stopped to catch our breath and have lunch.  But we still had to get through the leech zone on the way back down.

We steeled ourselves—and then bolted down the hill like monkeys.  We must have taken all of half an hour from summit to trail head.  Inevitably for me at speeds like that, I tripped and fell—at which point all the lurking leeches jumped onto my body.  I got most of them off, but later discovered a couple hiding on my lower back and—not kidding, horror of horror shows, my groin.

My ankles itched for the next two months.  In trying to figure out how to speed up leech bite healing, I read that Australia’s not even the worst for leech attacks—in some tropical rainforests, they’ll also drop out of trees to get you.  Ew ew ew ew.

One final leech story:  I told my aunt about this experience and she related how she, during a trek in Nepal to Everest Base Camp, had been surprised to see a line of blood running down her inner leg at a completely nonsensical time of the month.  Upon investigation, she discovered a leech that had attached itself to her groin, then gorged itself so much that it had BURST.  Puke!

My Annoyance Factor Ratings for leeches:

Swarming: 9/10 slaps for crawling out en masse to eat you when they smell you walking by

Itchiness: 10/10 slaps for bite longevity.  Those bites were bastards.

Ability to make you eat them by accident: 0/10, unless you’re seriously weird indeed.

You know you want to!

Ability to kill you if you’re unlucky: 1/10.  I imagine you could get overly leached by leeches—but I don’t think that’s happened to anyone outside of CSI Miami.  If you know of someone, please, tell me--it'll help me justify being so demented.