![]() ![]() The best-known species, such as the medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, are hematophagous, attaching themselves to a host with a sucker and feeding on blood, having first secreted the peptide hirudin to prevent the blood from clotting. The majority of leeches live in freshwater habitats, while some species can be found in terrestrial or marine environments. The body is muscular and relatively solid, and the coelom, the spacious body cavity found in other annelids, is reduced to small channels. Both groups are hermaphrodites and have a clitellum, but leeches typically differ from the oligochaetes in having suckers at both ends and in having ring markings that do not correspond with their internal segmentation. They are closely related to the oligochaetes, which include the earthworm, and like them have soft, muscular segmented bodies that can lengthen and contract. Leeches are segmented parasitic or predatory worms that comprise the subclass Hirudinea within the phylum Annelida. Wikipedia Rate this definition: 0.0 / 0 votes Sticking like leeches, till they burst with blood, A kind of small water serpent, which fastens on animals, and sucks the blood: it is used to draw blood where the lancet is less safe, whence perhaps the name. Tried every health restoring herb and gum,Īnd wearied out his painful skill in vain. The hoary wrinkled leech has watch’d and toil’d, Wise leeches will not vain receipts obtrude ĭeaf to complaints they wait upon the ill, His cunning hand ’gan to his wounds to lay,Īnd all things else the which his art did teach.Īnd shake their heads, desponding of their art. Her words prevail’d, and then the learned leach A physician a professor of the art of healing: whence we still use cowleech.Īnd well could cure the same his name was patience. ![]() Samuel Johnson's Dictionary Rate this definition: 0.0 / 0 votesĮtymology: læc, Saxon. ![]()
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