Talk:Chtonobdella limbata

Why Is there so little information about these horrible creatures?

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by SL93 talk 02:31, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

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C. limbata in Sydney.

• ... that some Australian forests are home to 6 centimetre-long land leeches (pictured) that use saw-like jaws to cut open their victims' skin?

• Source: Description of a soft-bodied invertebrate with microcomputed tomography and revision of the genus Chtonobdella (Hirudinea: Haemadipsidae) — alternatively, you can also read this source with this slightly suspicious Google Drive file.

• • ALT1: ... that the leech Chtonobdella limbata (pictured) can survive months without any water by entering an inanimate state? Source: Observations on the Australian land-leech, Chtonobdella limbata.
  • ALT2: ... that the land leech Chtonobdella limbata (pictured) has a small prehensile hook-like protrusion at the tip of its rear sucker? Source: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.24590/page/n416/mode/1up?q=limbata
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/2024 Tallahassee tornadoes is in progress; will give a check mark shortly.
  • Comment: I am in two (or, more precisely, three) minds about the hook. ALT0 is the most "hooky" in a vaguely horrifying kind of way, but that's true for all land leeches that happen to live in Australia: it's not unique to this species. ALT1, I think, is a decent alternative, but it and ALT2 lack a certain hookiness that would appeal to non-hirudophiles.

5x expanded by Cremastra (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 10 past nominations.

Cremastra (talk) 22:31, 7 March 2025 (UTC).

• This article, 5x expanded between 2 and 7 March, is new enough, long enough, well-sourced, and presentable. QPQ provided. Image is free and legible at low res. All three hooks are in the article and cited. I prefer ALT1, which I have verified. Good to go. Tenpop421 (talk) 21:17, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

GA review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Chtonobdella limbata/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: Cremastra (talk · contribs) 15:08, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

Reviewer: ZKevinTheCat (talk · contribs) 16:34, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for taking this on. Cremastra _talk 20:07, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Beginning the GA review. Good luck. —ZKevinTheCat

Review

There are a lot of good things about this article but also a lot of rough spots. Going through the criteria:

1. The writing is mostly fine, fine enough for GA. It does read a bit awkwardly but its not anything that needs to be adressed. There are also sections that should be moved around. The anhydrobiosis part should probably be under behavior, and habitat and distribution could be merged.

2. The article does have some citations, but there are large parts of it that rely on just one. The biggest example of this is the anhydrobiosis section, which relies on just one part of one book. There is also only one citation in the distribution section. In total there are only 18 citations, which is quite low. Of the citations that are there, they do back up statements in the article. More citations would be nice, but not required.

3. Again, most of the article is fine, but the behavior and distribution sections are pretty lacking. The article mentions earlier that the species is found in the subtropics, but the distribution sections only talks about Australia. This needs to be cleared up. The behavior section is also extremely short and not even really on topic. It talks about parasitising birds, which is more ecology than behavior. I would suggest merging the info about the bird and the distribution section into an ecology section. You should also write more about its ecology in general. The behavior section should have more info as well, and be merged with the anhydrobiosis section.

4-6. Fine

So, quickly summarizing, the article is mostly fine, but there are a lot of things that don't have enough citations, sections that need to be moved around, and more info about its ecology and behavior. ZKevinTheCat (talk) 16:06, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

3 I will work on. 2 I take issue with: it's fine if something is covered by one citation because it's clearly important to the topic; there's no point in refbombing the article with redundant citations. So long as everything is cited and verified, there is no problem with the citations, presuming your upcoming spot check doesn't uncover any mistakes. Cremastra _talk 19:45, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

fair enough I suppose. I just like to cross-reference to back up stuff more. ZKevinTheCat (talk) 01:28, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

If it was a better-covered topic I wouldn't complain as much, but leeches are among the chronically underresearched, so it's unlikely there is another source to back this up with, at least not one I can access. Cremastra _talk 22:45, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

@ZKevinTheCat I added a short bit about parasites of the leeches, noted they parasitized humans, and gave a fairly detailled summary of Richardson's observations about their feeding behaviour. I couldn't find much about other hosts. Cremastra _talk 23:39, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

all right, looks good. A lot more comprehensive and is pretty well-written. I don't really have anything else to comment on, so I think I'll give it the greenlight. ZKevinTheCat (talk) 05:53, 25 April 2025 (UTC)

@ZKevinTheCat You need to do a spot-check for the review to be valid. Cremastra _talk 12:26, 25 April 2025 (UTC)

Forgot to post it:

[4] - good, [9] - good, [16] - good ZKevinTheCat (talk) 14:12, 25 April 2025 (UTC)