Mark Siddall: The Bottom of Things

(logo whooshing) (film projector whirring) (type writer clicking) (type writer chiming) - There's a leech in Southern Africa called Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi that has the unusual habit of feeding from the rear ends 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.

(airplane propellers whirring) 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 murderer.

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.

(slide projector clicking) 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."

(gentle instrumental music) We were really, actually quite terrified.

We had gone sometime without actually finding anything 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 apparently it lived in the rectum, so he got out his knife and apparently 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 a great big leech!

So that was how we actually finally got the hippo leech, Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi.

That was amazing to me.

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 chap.

(film projector whirring)