Newly discovered species named for Alloway couple

Six years ago, Bill Ott was minding his business, mowing his backyard in Alloway, Salem County, when he spied something black, about a foot long, and slimy in a ditch. Another man might have stomped it, mowed it over, or turned tail and run.

But Bill took it to his nature-loving wife, Carol, who didn't scream or recoil. On the contrary, she took an immediate shine to the alien thing, brought it into the house, and set out to make it happy.

"It was quite a unique creature," Carol Ott said.

Little did she know.

Biologists at Rutgers University-Camden identified the Otts' find as a new species of terrestrial leech, one of only three species known in North America. Their research was presented at last year's annual leech symposium at the Smithsonian Institution and will be published in a journal called Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

The name of the leech: Haemopis ottorum, in honor of the Otts.

"It is a distinct species," said Beth Wirchansky, who as a Rutgers biology graduate student participated in the research with Daniel Shain, an internationally known leech expert and Rutgers associate professor.

The Otts' leech is distinctly South Jersey - a Piney, in fact, so far found only in the triangle of land whose far points are Alloway, Winslow, and Pomona. Wirchansky spent a lot of time swatting mosquitoes in North Jersey swamplands, but her search turned up not one of the jet-black beauties.

"Some people are afraid of [leeches], but there's a lot that can be learned from them," said Wirchansky, who now works for the Institute for Personalized Medicine of Fox Chase Cancer Center.

They have been used in neurobiological and stem-cell research, she said. Their saliva is an ingredient in hirudin, an anticoagulant. They're hermaphrodites, possessing reproductive organs of both genders. They're said to be good parents.

They also have been around a long, long time. It's believed that the three known species of North American terrestrial leeches are descended from aquatic leeches of the Great Lakes region that got moved to other parts of the continent by glaciers.

Contrary to popular belief, most leeches don't suck blood, but they do have suckers. Haemopis ottorum has one at each end of its underside. It's partial to worms, not blood.

But Carol Ott wasn't privy to all that when, on a hot July day, she took the mysterious stranger into her home.

What possessed her?

When she was growing up in Gloucester County, she said, her three brothers were always bringing wild things home. As an adult, so does she. She, her husband, and their son, William, now a 21-year-old Rowan University art major, love the outdoors and all its inhabitants.

"We're just curious people," she said.

Once, fishing in the Delaware Bay, they caught a little shark. "Me and my son had the best time petting him. Then we put him back."

She has e-mailed the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia to inquire about unusual-looking insects she has found in the family's patch of rural Salem County.

Though not lab-trained - she has worked as a bookkeeper and made custom guitar straps for musicians including Conway Twitty and George James - Carol Ott instinctively fell into the scientific method to figure how to care for her houseguest.

Suspecting it was a leech and more familiar with the aquatic variety, she put it in water.

"It looked like it was struggling," she said. So she put it into an aquarium with a little water and stones. Much better. Later she added a container of soil. That went over big.

"I was just trying to find out what he preferred," she said. "I guess I was trying to think like a leech."

Through trial and error, she learned what to feed it. A little fish? No interest. A baby mouse? Ignored. But worms got sucked down like strands of spaghetti.

She did computer searches for "leech expert" and found Rutgers' Shain.

They e-mailed. Carol Ott said at first he had seemed incredulous. When they realized they lived only about 20 miles apart, they arranged a creature meet. That was when, she said, Shain realized that an unknown species of an animal he had traveled the world studying had been practically in his own backyard.

Carol Ott knew that Shain, who is now in Turkey at an aquatic-worm conference, wanted to study her leech, but she wasn't ready to give the creature up. She enjoyed his company, and alternated his tank between the kitchen and the living room. Plus, a giant leech was just the thing to freak out her son's friends.

"I'd say, 'Oh, have I shown you my pet?' "

But after several months, she felt the time had come.

The leech continued to thrive in Shain's lab. The Otts had never named it, but Shain and his students called it Piwi for a stem cell they were studying. More specimens were found on the Otts' property, though none of his impressive stature.

One day, the Otts got the call. It was the professor.

" 'I have some bad news,' " Carol Ott recalled him saying. "He said, 'Piwi died.' "

Not in vain, however. The work of establishing the existence of a new species continued. Over the next few years, Shain's team hunted for more Piwis. The researchers traveled to North Carolina to find another land-leech species to prove theirs was different. Finally, over the summer, Shain and Wirchansky published their research.

The Otts are tickled to be namesakes.

"I think that's pretty cool," Carol Ott said. "My son's telling everybody. I'm calling relatives. It's official."

Until Nov. 1 in the lobby of Rutgers-Camden's Science Building on Third Street between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, there is a display of the Haemopis ottorum research along with live specimens of the three North American leech species. It's free and open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The Otts hope to go with family and friends to celebrate their contribution to science. They know not everyone would have chosen their path.

"I had one person say, 'I would have taken my penknife to it,' " Carol Ott said. "Well, then it would never have been discovered."