Estimating Population Density Of The Medicinal Leech Hirudo Orientalis Utevsky And Trontelj, 2005 (Clitellata: Hirudinida) Using Visible Implant Elastomer Tags

Medicinal leeches have lately come into the spotlight as useful and effective invertebrates in the treatment of some diseases and surgical procedures. Populations of the Iranian medicinal leech, Hirudo orientalis, are under considerable threat due to over-exploitation. To find a viable technique for estimating leech population size in their natural habitat, a tagging method using fluorescent dye was investigated. In the present study, to test the method's efficiency, numbers of medicinal leeches were estimated in the artificial leech ponds of the University of Tehran, by the capture-mark-recapture method, using the Lincoln index. Leeches were caught from the ponds, marked using commercially available visible implant elastomer (VIE) tags, released and later recaptured. The technique proved successful, and low standard error values (7.07-11.85) in this study showed that the VIE tagging method could be applied as a useful tool for evaluating medicinal leech population size. This is the first use of this method to estimate medicinal leech population size.