What do leeches eat? An introduction to the main food sources of leeches
Leeches are omnivorous animals, and their main way of life is sucking the blood or body fluids of animals. The broad-body golden leech (Whitmania pigra) mainly feeds on: river snails, golden apple snails, freshwater mussels, etc., and it is enough to feed them live prey; blood-sucking species such as the Japanese medicinal leech (Hirudo nipponia) and the buffalo leech (Poecilobdella manillensis) mainly feed on blood clots of animals, and at the same time this must be combined with culturing plankton in the base to achieve a reasonable diet for the leeches.
1. Leeches are omnivorous animals, and their main way of life is sucking the blood or body fluids of animals. They often take plankton, insects, and mollusks in the water as their main bait, and under artificial conditions they use various animal internal organs, cooked egg yolk, compound feed, plant residues, freshwater snails and shellfish, miscellaneous fish, earthworms, etc. as bait. Wild leeches mostly suck the blood of frogs, which is their favorite food.
2. Blood-sucking species such as the Japanese medicinal leech (Hirudo nipponia) and the buffalo leech (Poecilobdella manillensis) mainly feed on blood clots of animals, and at the same time this must be combined with culturing plankton in the base to achieve a reasonable diet for the leeches.
3. In terms of morphology, the foods that leeches are suited to obtain and digest mainly include the blood of golden apple snails, fish, turtles, frogs, birds, and mammals, and they can serve as temporary external parasites of these animals. They also consume the carrion, body fluids, tissues, and whole bodies of invertebrates such as annelids, insect larvae, and mollusks. Only a few species of leeches specialize in feeding on a single kind of host animal; the diet of most species includes one or two categories of animals. For example, the genus Fishleech (Piscicola) feeds on the blood of fish, and the genus Shield Leech (Hemiclepsis) feeds on the blood of amphibians and reptiles.