Hirudinea lampyris: Untangling Sustainability through Design Fiction

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general. Environmental
destruction is scaled
back, and many species,
unknown and extinct
in our world, become
champions of this
world.
In this fiction, the
Firefly Leech is
introduced as one of
these champions. The
leech is hematophagous,
and through a chemical
reaction between the
hirudin in its saliva
and the hormones in the
food that it eats, the
Firefly Leech displays
the emotional state of
its last prey through
bioluminescence in its
skin. Through noninvasive
metabarcoding,
biologists are able
to identify the host
species the leech last
fed on, and are able
to get an empathetic
profile on the ecosystem
that it lives in.
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