This is Going Wild.

Shorts, and I'm Dr. Raywin Grant.

You already heard about my experience tracking lemurs in this mysterious rainforest in Madagascar,

but what I left out of that story was just how hard camping there for five weeks was on my

body and yes there's some blood involved so now I'm telling that story I'm telling that story I

sometimes I feel like I don't even know how to describe what it was like living in that rainforest for five weeks because for one, I think it goes without saying, but oh my gosh, it rains.

It rains so much.

And there was something that I didn't know about, again, having never done work in the tropics.

And those were tree leeches.

They, because it rains so much, these leeches are just on the leaves of trees, like in different parts of the canopy of the rainforest.

And when it rains, the rain slides them off the leaves and they drop down onto animals or whatnot, but also onto people.

I would find leeches in my hair.

They, for the most part, would fall kind of onto your neck and you don't feel them, right? Because that's a cool thing about leeches is that they start sucking your blood and you have no idea.

So although this was something we had to deal with every single day, there weren't any

actual long-term consequences of this. It's more the principle that it was really gross and

pretty disturbing. I distinctly remember one of my colleagues, for whatever reason, had a white

shirt, and I can't imagine why anyone would bring a white shirt camping for so long in the

rainforest but he had gone out for the day and leeches had fallen from the trees you know onto his

head gone down his neck and onto his back and so when he returned to camp he took off his backpack

and his back was covered in blood it just looked like a bloody mess and he had

no idea and so he peeled off his shirt after we're all freaking out and we all took turns just

peeling leeches off of his back oh my gosh the tree leeches no one talks about that when they talk know, and I will admit, I don't usually talk about it because I talk about how awesome and adventurous it was. But tree leeches were a big part of life as well. And that is just, like, even shiver a little bit when I think about it.

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