From The Economist:
The worst of the hazards travellers encounter in the mountainous rainforests of southern India is not the elephants, though they occasionally kill people; nor the creepy-crawlies, though the sudden appearance of a foot-long red-legged millipede can startle; nor the spiny-stemmed palms, though they shred unwary walkers’ clothes. It is the leeches.
If you pause on a walk through the forest, within a minute up to 20 of these brown slimy tubes, ranging in size from minuscule threads to fat worms four centimetres long and a quarter in diameter, leap onto your boots. Attracted by heat, they loop swiftly upwards like caterpillars on speed, scaling a Wellington in as little as 15 seconds. Leech socks—thick canvas affairs tied tightly at the knee—stop those that climb into boots from attacking your feet. But others continue upwards, and, however assiduously you pluck them off, some inevitably make it onto bare skin and sink their teeth into your flesh. As they do so, their salivary glands secrete hirudin, an anticoagulant so effective that the pharmaceutical industry synthesises it as a blood-thinning agent. Even if you locate them and pluck them off—tricky, given their strong grip and slippery surface—your blood flows from their bites for hours.
Not surprisingly, Kerala’s rainforests are thinly populated. Only the very determined, with a clear purpose and considerable resilience, venture into them. Among those are Sathyabhama Biju Das, an amphibian researcher at Delhi University, his students and his growing band of followers. More:
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