Currently there are 60 species known to science, of which 50 belong to the Family Haemadipsidae (literally “Blood – thirsty”), while the rest are in the Family Xerobdellida. "It's a bit like a drip of cold water on hot skin you feel them grinding for a bit and then it stops.Land leeches are native to Madagascar and India and the islands of Indonesia, but there are some species found in Japan. "Then the leech injects an anaesthetic and you don't feel it. "You only feel it for the first 20 to 30 seconds," Robert says. Her husband Robert has had his own experience of leeches after an accident. And it is that flow of blood which is now oxygenated which allows the body to heal and restore a return flow. "The leech injects a cocktail of drugs - local anaesthetic, flow enhancers, anti-coagulants. "So they put leeches on every half an hour around the clock for three to five days. That means blood pools and the area can become gangrenous. Surgeons can reattach a finger and join the arterial flows but often not the venous flow. The leeches are used to solve a significant problem in plastic surgery. "They swim quite gracefully a nice side-to-side motion," Maria says. And fed with blood from the nearby meatworks. Their 60,000 leeches, all hermaphrodites with a life expectancy of around nine years, are now held in fish tanks in a renovated cowshed. There's no manual for breeding leeches, Maria says. We noticed that where waterways are fenced off the leeches become smaller and skinnier." "Fencing off waterways from cattle is not beneficial to leeches because the best leeches feed off cattle when the animals stand in the water. They shifted farms to Waikato and started paying families to find leeches, but they soon started to worry about hygiene, the supply of quality leeches and other issues. So they started storing and breeding them. So you can only reliably get them for two to three months in the spring." We thought we better start keeping them because they hibernate in the winter and the ponds go dry in a drought in Northland - the leeches disappear into the mud. "Luckily it was springtime and the leeches were out of hibernation so the kids went down and got some, we put them in an ice cream bowl. He rang the zoo and they referred him to us. And a surgeon at Middlemore saw the article and they had a patient they had done a lot of work on but were in danger of losing what they had sewn back on. And that started a controversy can you get AIDS or hepatitis from feeding leeches. "They were lining people up once a month to feed them. Our daughter said 'we can get leeches' so long story short, we ended up sending leeches to the zoo. "Our kids were coming home with bucketfuls. At the same time, an Auckland Zoo scientist was doing a creepy-crawly exhibition and came to find leeches. On a farm north of Dargaville, they and their children discovered the dune lakes were full of eels and leeches. The couple, originally from Northland, got into the breeding and selling of leeches by accident. You might have recalled on TV all these people loading up their cars from Mitre 10 and Bunnings with timber and saws. "We sent leeches during the Covid shutdown. "The first warm weekend in spring often sees an upsurge in orders as do-it-yourselfers get out there and do-to-yourself. They keep around 2000 leeches ready at a time from a stock of anywhere between 50,000 and 60,000 leeches.Īnd being ready means having leeches that haven't been fed fresh blood for anything between six and 18 months. "If I get a call from Christchurch at 2pm, they'll have them by 10pm." When an order comes in they will dispatch up to 300 leeches at a time. "It seems to be men more than women who are cutting fingers." "Men and skill saws are very good for business," Maria says. The Waikato couple owns a leech farm supplying hospitals throughout the country to help in surgery to restore blood flow to severed fingers or for restorative surgery after cancer treatments. If it's a nice fine spring weekend, then Maria and Robert Lupton know they'll probably get a call from a hospital asking for their leeches.
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