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I read last issue’s leech letter with interest – as I am an outdoor swimmer and because my day job involves looking after the ecology of rivers, lakes and bathing waters in wonderful Dorset and Wiltshire! Attached is a picture of my swimming spot – my two boys on their first swim of the year in the River Avon over the Easter holidays. They can’t wait to get in each year. I, however, am a skins swimmer and can’t last as long as them early in the season!

So, I asked one of our macro-invertebrate specialists to have a look at the picture of the leech. Obviously it’s difficult to be totally accurate without having the wee beastie under a microscope, but we think it’s a duck leech (Theromyzon tessulatum). It’s pretty unusual for them to invade human nostrils, but they habitually do so in ducks, for which they are adapted. They would normally lay eggs in a duck’s nose and their young would live there for a period of time. In this case, we expect the beastie was a tad confused and probably wouldn’t receive the correct environmental cues to lay eggs (plus you’d blow them out anyway even if it did). So this swimmer was pretty unlucky and would almost certainly not have come to any harm – it’s just a bit freaky!