CT scanning tiny leeches

Computed tomography (CT) has been an incredibly useful tool for medicine - just recently has it become refined and efficient enough to work on small, soft-bodied invertebrates. My colleagues and I just produced the first micro-CT scans for a leech, recovering the internal anatomy of a new Australian leech species that was too small to dissect (we named the species, Chtonobdella tanae, after Amy Tan). Several details recovered from the scans were far beyond what we generally recover from dissections, and we now have a 3D model for all the internal organs of this new species. I hope this sets the stage well for future studies of creepy crawlies! Check out the study at Zoologica Scripta.