New occurrence of freshwater leech Hemiclepsis schrencki identified in Hokkaido, highlighting its indigenous nature.
Freshwater leeches of the genus Hemiclepsis Vejdovský, 1884 were collected in Hokkaido, Japan, and identified as H. schrencki Bolotov, Klass, Bespalaya, Konopleva, Kondakov & Vikhrev, 2019. This marks the first recorded occurrence of the species beyond the Eurasian continent. The H. schrencki specimen from Hokkaido displays a distinct mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) sequence variant, represented by a single terminal in the phylogeny, suggesting that the local population is indigenous to this region.
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Kambayashi et al. (2025) studied this question.
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