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- Leeches are evolution's best surgeons
Leeches are evolution's best surgeons
Answers for Globle, Metazooa, Stocktangle and more from Jan 5 - Jan 11
Abe Train
January 12, 2026
Coming to your inbox every Monday with a brand new fun-fact and all the answers to Trainwreck Labs games from the past week.
This week, we have…
Trainwreck Labs welcomes new players!
A fun fact inspired by Metazooa
Answers to last week's games
Reader survey
Welcome all new Metazooa players!
On Thursday, January 8th, a biology teacher posted a TikTok of himself playing Metazooa and it went viral! Thousands of new players flooded in, and I couldn't be more thrilled to welcome you all. Whether you're a teacher, a student, or just someone who loves learning something new each day, you're in the right place. Come say hi on Discord!
@a_biology_teacher Metazooa Day 891 #metazooa #science #stem #learning #biology
If you’re a new player but this particular TikTok isn’t what brought you here, I would love to hear from you. Reply to this email to let me know how you found the game!
Leeches still have their place in modern medicine
Rumour has it that The Pitt was going to be about a leech hospital but they reshot the whole first season with human actors after bad test screenings.
Picture this: you're wading through a murky pond when something latches onto your ankle. Before you can panic, a creature no bigger than your thumb has already sliced into your skin with surgical precision, using not one, not two, but three separate jaws working in perfect harmony.
Leeches (Metazooa animal #891) are nature's most underrated engineers. Each of their Y-shaped jaws operates independently, sawing back and forth like tiny serrated pizza cutters. The result is a wound that bleeds freely but causes surprisingly little pain. That's no accident. Evolution has fine-tuned these blood-suckers into stealth specialists.
Their saliva is basically a pharmaceutical cocktail. As those 300-ish teeth break your skin, the leech pumps in anticoagulants to keep your blood flowing, anesthetics so you won't notice the uninvited dinner guest, and vasodilators to widen your blood vessels. Think of it as a tiny, highly efficient restaurant where you're the buffet and never even saw the menu.
This biological brilliance caught the attention of modern medicine. Surgeons today regularly apply leeches to patients after reconstructive surgery, using them to drain pooled blood and restore circulation to reattached fingers and ears. Those medieval doctors with their bloodletting obsession weren't completely wrong. They just lacked the science to explain why it sometimes worked. The leech, meanwhile, spent 400 million years perfecting a system that humans are only now learning to exploit. Not bad for a creature most people dismiss as pond slime.
Learn more: National Geographic
Trivia
The Amazon leech is the largest known leech species. How long can they get? |
Answers to last week's games
Monday, January 5 to Sunday, January 11
Globle
| Globle: Capitals
|
Chronogram
| Fictogram
|
Metazooa
| Metaflora
|
Linxicon
The following are the shortest paths from last week:
#693 band → colour → contrast
#694 boat → job → show → prove
#695 cheese → chair → sit
#696 homeless → housing → school → math → ratio
#697 director → direct → exact → roughly
#698 resident → owner → share
#699 comfort → comforted → apologized → sorry
#700 Play now!
Elemingle
| Stocktangle
|
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!
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