Love the languid leech

I got a worried call from a neighbour the other day. There were leeches in his garden pond. Big ones.

I reassured him he wasn’t going to get nasty blood-sucking creatures attached to him every time he did pond work. There is only one species of leech in this part of the world that can do that, the medicinal leech, and it appears to have become extinct in Ireland over 100 years ago.

There are still a few wild populations left in Britain and on the Continent but it’s classified as an endangered species and there are special conservation measures to protect it. There are about a dozen other species of freshwater leech found here, and a few salt- water ones off the coast. They are all harmless to humans, though some could attack water fowl, goldfish or frogs in a pond.