- [Announcer] Funding for the secret life of scientists is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
(swooshing sound) (bright music) (keyboard typing) - There's a leech in Southern Africa called Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi.
That has a unusual habit of feeding from the rear ends of of hippos and only feeds from the rear ends of hippos.
I went to South Africa probably four times before I managed to get it.
(helicopter whirring) (birds chirping) We needed to get that leech.
We went to Kruger Park in the Eastern part of South Africa.
Absolutely beautiful place, lions, rhinos elephants, leopards but if you want hippo leeches, you gotta find hippos.
Of course hippos kill more people in Africa than any other world and the reason is that they have enormous teeth and they come across each other like this like scissors.
So if you get bitten by a hippo it'll basically cut you in half, but we got permission to get out of our vehicles because we were doing biological research, but we had to go with a park warden and he had this big rifle.
(rifle cocking) So we went out and we're walking into a hippo pool at dawn.
This is when the hippos could still be out of the water and then get angry with you and I said, "have you ever had to use your rifle?"
And he says, no, I said, "okay, so what's the rifle for?"
He says, "well, you're going into a hippo pool and if a hippo bites you, you might want me to shoot you."
(upbeat music) We were really actually quite terrified.
We had gone some time without actually finding anything (upbeat music) In a lot of different places, not just in Kruger Park and then a hippo near people's homes been wandering around in a community and they had to kill the hippo and our park ranger had remembered that these crazy Americans were looking for a hippo leech and that some, apparently it lived in the rectum.
So he got out his knife apparently and he cut the rectum of the hippo out and stuck it in a jar and kept it for us.
So we quickly drove down and sure enough in it had a great big leech.
So that was how we actually finally got the hippo leech, Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi.
That was amazing to me.
(calm music) Our kind of science, my kind of science.
Are there some dangerous situations?
Yes.
Why do we do these things?
Because it's about discovery.
I guess if it's easy, it isn't worth discovering remembering that success after so much failure puts it in a very special place.
There you go, that's not a bad shot.
(ticking sound) (thunder sound) (swooshing sound) (typing sound) I believe my science is about discovery and is directed by the kinds of questions that we need to ask and what I do in terms of cooking is also about discovery.
Going to a lot of different places around the world collecting leeches, you get to see what people eat.
So for me, it's really getting to know the ingredients that go into something that I just ate.
When we're in the field I do tend to take on the cooking responsibility and that's great.
That's something that I love to do at the end of a long day in the field to do something creative, something different than what we were doing.
When we were in the field in New Brunswick we had caught a Cod, big Cod and we went through it for the worm parasites in the flesh.
And we pulled all of the worm stages out of the fish because we were doing some parapsychology and we're left with all this fish meat, not wanting to throw it out I made a Caribbean jerk Cod.
Then for dessert, I got some some Irish Moss, which is a red seaweed that grows in the area and steeped that in milk for about 20 minutes, added some vanilla and some sugar, strained it that makes this nice little jellified custard.
Tastes a little bit like the sea and a little bit like vanilla.
(calm music) I think what's happened with me, is that cooking and preparing food is coming from very deep inside and is this creative outlet for me that really works.
(pot cluttering) Need something you can whisk with.
You need something you can make a double boiler out of and of course a stove.
Also I've eaten a lot of strange things and you might imagine that I've eaten a leech and indeed I have.
Leeches are edible.
It was on a dare and I decided that if I was gonna do this I was going to make it taste as little like a leech as possible.
And so I stuck it on a stick and roasted over a fire and sure enough, I can attest to the fact that leeches taste a lot like charcoal.
(calm music) My guess is though that the other sort of very muscular leeches like the giant Amazonian leech little garlic butter, some herbs, you know, I think that be a little bit like escargot.
(calm music) (thunder sound) (swooshing sound) (keyboard typing) I am a curator at the museum of natural history.
Museums of natural history are like libraries of biodiversity and libraries without books are useless.
I run around and find the books in this case species of leeches find out where they are, where they live, how they're related to each other and once we figure out how they're related to each other try to find out something interesting about that.
For example, with the leeches, how did they evolve?
What does that mean in terms of the evolution of blood feeding?
What does it mean in terms of the movement of continents around the globe?
Was that 30 seconds?
(Siddall chuckles) I need a clock.
(thunder sound) (swooshing sound) (keyboard typing) (keyboard typing) Ankle, because it's easy to bite through it's not callous like your hand.
(keyboard typing) Eating wild.
(keyboard typing) Cast iron.
(keyboard typing) Are these movies?
I don't have TV.
(keyboard typing) Salt.
(keyboard typing) Anti-coagulants of course.
(keyboard typing) The last time I ate blood was in Taiwan.
We had this beautiful bowl of very, very spicy broth and also floating in that broth, pig heart bits and gelled goose blood.
It really had a fascinating texture.
(keyboard typing) Julia Child, she was a spy.
(keyboard typing) Got to be in the "African Queen" when Humphrey Bogart had leeches on his chest and Catherine Hepburn was dumping salt on it and he says, "I hate leeches, they're dirty little buggers."
(keyboard typing) Somebody's gotta be the leech man.
(bright music)