Leeches Reveal How Forever Chemicals Quietly Build Up in Freshwater Sediments

In the murky sediment at the bottom of ponds, rivers, and lakes, a quiet chemical drama is unfolding. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the notoriously persistent industrial chemicals known as PFAS, have been detected in aquatic environments across the globe, and the compounds that settle into sediments can persist there for decades. Now, a team of researchers at China Pharmaceutical University has turned to an unlikely sentinel to track what happens when one of the most infamous members of this chemical family, perfluorooctane sulfonate or PFOS, seeps into the benthic zone where sediment and water meet: the medicinal leech Poecilobdella manillensis. Their study, published in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, offers some of the first detailed evidence of how PFOS accumulates in a freshwater benthic annelid and how the animal’s biochemistry responds under controlled exposure conditions.

PFOS is a legacy PFAS compound that was once widely used in stain repellents, firefighting foams, and surface coatings, and its extreme chemical stability is precisely what makes it an environmental headache. The carbon-fluorine bonds that give PFOS its useful surfactant properties also render it nearly indestructible in natural systems, earning the broader class the nickname forever chemicals. Regulatory agencies have taken notice: the United States Environmental Protection Agency has moved to establish national primary drinking water regulations for PFAS, and the European Chemicals Agency has incorporated PFAS into its persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic assessment frameworks. Yet while the toxicity of PFOS has been extensively characterized in fish and other conventional laboratory models, sediment-dwelling invertebrates, the organisms that live in direct and prolonged contact with contaminated particles, have received far less attention. That gap matters, because benthic animals occupy a critical position in aquatic food webs and can serve as conduits for contaminant movement from sediments into higher trophic levels.

The research team, led by Xiangran Yin with Weitao Shen and Lan Fu as corresponding authors, designed a 14-day exposure experiment using a static sediment-water microcosm system. This setup allowed the leeches to experience PFOS in a context that approximates their natural habitat, with both a water column and a sediment phase present. Four exposure concentrations were tested, and the researchers measured three things over time: how much PFOS accumulated in leech tissues, how a panel of antioxidant-related biomarkers changed, and how antithrombin activity, a measure tied to the leech’s famous blood-anticoagulating biochemistry, responded. The choice of P. manillensis was deliberate. The species is listed in the Pharmacopoeia of the People’s Republic of China, is commercially cultured, and has well-characterized anticoagulant biochemistry, making it both ecologically relevant and practically tractable as a laboratory model.

To quantify accumulation dynamics, the team fitted their tissue concentration data to a dual-box kinetic model, estimating an absorption rate constant, K1, and a release rate constant, K2. The results were unambiguous. Across all exposure concentrations, K1 consistently exceeded K2, meaning that the rate at which leeches took up PFOS outpaced the rate at which they could eliminate it. Tissue burdens climbed steadily with exposure duration, and the effect was most pronounced at the highest exposure level. In practical terms, this suggests that during the exposure window the leeches never reached a steady state where uptake and elimination balanced out; they were still accumulating PFOS when the experiment ended. For a benthic organism in a chronically contaminated waterway, where exposure can continue for months or years, that kinetic imbalance points toward a substantial potential for long-term body burdens.

Why does PFOS accumulate so readily in animal tissues? The answer lies in its molecular behavior. Unlike many hydrophobic contaminants that partition into fat stores, PFOS binds strongly to proteins, particularly those with fatty acid binding domains. Studies in rainbow trout, carp, and zebrafish have shown that serum proteins and liver fatty acid binding proteins act as internal reservoirs for perfluorinated acids, and competitive partitioning among PFAS compounds of different chain lengths can further shape where these chemicals end up in the body. A leech, an animal whose whole biology revolves around blood and protein-rich secretions, may offer abundant protein binding sites for PFOS. The researchers’ finding that accumulation continued to rise throughout the exposure period is consistent with this protein-binding mechanism, which favors slow equilibration and slow clearance.

The biochemical side of the study focused on oxidative stress, a well-established response to many environmental toxicants. When organisms encounter reactive chemical stressors, they generate reactive oxygen species that can damage lipids, proteins, and DNA. Antioxidant enzymes such as superoxide dismutase form the first line of defense, converting superoxide radicals into less harmful species. In the exposed leeches, PFOS induced significant oxidative stress overall. Total superoxide dismutase activity followed a distinctive pattern: it initially decreased and then subsequently increased over the exposure period, a trajectory that may reflect an early phase of enzyme inhibition or depletion followed by a compensatory upregulation of antioxidant defenses. Total antioxidant capacity, which integrates the combined activity of the animal’s full antioxidant arsenal, displayed an inverted U-shaped temporal response, rising and then falling across the 14 days. These non-linear patterns underscore a key point in ecotoxicology: biomarker responses are dynamic, and single time-point measurements can miss the full arc of an organism’s physiological struggle.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding concerns antithrombin activity. Leeches are famous for their anticoagulant chemistry, most notably hirudin, a potent thrombin inhibitor that has been studied for applications ranging from cardiovascular protection to antifibrotic therapy. The researchers found that PFOS exposure produced significant temporal changes in antithrombin activity, and that this activity was significantly correlated with total protein content, total superoxide dismutase activity, and total antioxidant capacity. This statistical coupling suggests that the leech’s anticoagulant biochemistry does not operate in isolation from its stress responses; rather, contaminant pressure appears to ripple through interconnected biochemical networks linking oxidative defense, protein metabolism, and anticoagulation. Prior work on related leech species has shown that PFAS mixtures can perturb acute inflammatory responses, and peptidomic studies continue to uncover new anticoagulant peptides in P. manillensis, so the intersection of pollution and leech pharmacology is a frontier with real biomedical as well as ecological stakes.

The broader context of PFAS contamination in sediments gives these findings added weight. Surveys of surface sediments in China’s marginal seas have documented decade-long shifts in both legacy and emerging PFAS compounds, with evidence of ongoing production and persistent ecological risk. PFAS have been shown to migrate downward through lake sediment profiles, complicating historical trend reconstructions, and elevated PFAS levels have been measured in freshwater benthic macroinvertebrates in the Hudson River watershed. Bioturbation, the sediment-disturbing activity of burrowing and feeding organisms, has been demonstrated to affect PFAS uptake from sediments by both invertebrates and rooted plants. In other words, the sediment compartment is not a chemical sink where contamination goes to rest; it is an active zone of exchange, and the organisms living there are both exposed and consequential.

What the new study adds is a candidate biomonitoring tool tailored to that zone. Fish are mobile and can avoid contaminated patches; water sampling captures only the dissolved fraction at a moment in time. A benthic leech, by contrast, sits in continuous contact with sediment and integrates exposure over days to weeks. The authors present their results as preliminary evidence for the potential use of medicinal leeches as freshwater benthic biomonitoring organisms, and the combination of measurable accumulation kinetics, responsive antioxidant biomarkers, and a unique antithrombin endpoint gives the species a distinctive analytical profile. The dual-box model framework they applied could be extended to compare uptake and elimination across sites, concentrations, or co-occurring contaminants, providing a quantitative basis for field deployment.

Caveats remain, as the researchers themselves acknowledge. The 14-day exposure captures early accumulation dynamics but not the long-term steady state or the full elimination phase, and laboratory microcosms cannot reproduce every variable of a natural waterway, from seasonal temperature shifts to complex mixtures of pollutants. The correlations between antithrombin activity and other biochemical indicators are associations, not demonstrations of mechanism. Still, the study opens a genuinely novel window onto PFOS ecotoxicology. As regulators worldwide tighten PFAS limits and remediation efforts grapple with contaminated sediments, understanding how the organisms at the base of benthic food webs absorb and respond to these chemicals becomes essential. A leech that quietly records its chemical history in its tissues and its biochemistry may prove to be one of the most informative witnesses freshwater science has.

Subject of Research: PFOS bioaccumulation and biochemical toxicity responses in the freshwater benthic leech Poecilobdella manillensis

Article Title: Bioaccumulation and biochemical responses to perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) exposure in the freshwater benthic leech (Poecilobdella manillensis)

Article References: Yin, X., Sun, Z., Wang, B., Chen, J., Guo, R., Shen, W., & Fu, L. (2026). Bioaccumulation and biochemical responses to perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) exposure in the freshwater benthic leech (Poecilobdella manillensis). Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 198(10), Article 1119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-026-15944-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10661-026-15944-4

Keywords: PFOS, PFAS, leech, Poecilobdella manillensis, bioaccumulation, oxidative stress, antioxidant biomarkers, antithrombin activity, sediment, freshwater biomonitoring, ecotoxicology, toxicokinetics