THE SCIENCE OF BLOODSUCKERS

Between the "Twilight" movie and book series and HBO's "True Blood" TV series, vampires are getting a lot of exposure these days. But in biologist Bill Schutt's book, those fictional fang-wearers don't even deserve to be called vampires.

Instead, in "Dark Banquet," Schutt focuses on the true bloodsuckers of the natural world - vampire bats, leeches, bed bugs, the dreaded candiru fish and other critters that inspire tales as macabre and mysterious as any Halloween thriller.

"You couldn't make this stuff up," said Schutt, a professor at C.W. Post College of Long Island University and a research associate in mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History.

Consider, for instance, the saga of Napoleonic soldiers who sipped from lake water infested with tiny larval leeches as they crossed from Egypt to Syria in 1799: "Unbeknownst to their hosts, the creatures quickly attached themselves and began to feed," Schutt writes. "Days later the men began to take ill and medical personnel were horrified to find their patients' noses, mouths and throats carpeted by blood-engorged leeches."

Schutt, whose specialty is the study of rare vampire bats, also takes you on a spooky tour of a guano-drenched icehouse in Trinidad, where he comes close to walking right into an elevator shaft filled with rainwater and bat droppings.

Elsewhere in the book, he explains why leeches were once inserted into women who wanted to pose as virgins on their wedding night. ("Arguably the strangest use of leeches on record," Schutt writes.) He does a reality check on the urban legends surrounding the candiru, or Amazonian "willy fish," which is said to swim right up a person's urethra. ("Apparently, it does happen, although thankfully, occurrences are extremely rare.")

And he tells a fascinating tale about the scariest bloodsucker of them all, a creature that lives among us and preys nightly on humans: the humble bed bug.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/10/31/1622447.aspx

{ I dare you to read all this article, There's something in here to make everyone shudder. Of all the creepy-crawlies and things that go bump in the night...... anything that sucks blood for a living is the worse. I don't want anything to do with any "candiru fish" that's for sure!}