Fly Guy   By | August 1, 2012  image: Fly Guy Michael H.
Dickinson, Department of Biology Benjamin Hall, Endowed Chair in
Basic Life Sciences, University of WashingtonKevin Casey  Just
how hungry is a leech? As an undergraduate at Brown University
in the early 1980s, Michael Dickinson devised a clever way to
find out. After getting hooked on neuroethology—the study of the
neural mechanisms underlying animal behavior—Dickinson joined
the lab of Charles Lent, a biologist who worked with the
legendary bloodsuckers. One problem they were addressing was how
the animal regulates its feeding—a key question when it comes to
the medicinal leeches used, for example, to restore blood flow
to transplanted digits. “It sounds so trivial,” says Dickinson.
“But how can you measure whether a leech is hungry? How do you
quantify that?”  The solution Dickinson came up with involved a
warm cylinder wrapped in a bit of waxed paper. “A hungry leech
will bite the surface of the object just because it’s warm,” he
says. “It’ll bite,