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He crushed a few leaves. We took the tiniest of whiffs and were slammed with a wave of nausea.

We had just become honorary members of the club.

We walked down through eucalyptus forest and into a damp, muddy gully with a small stream running through it. In this lush environment, prehistoric tree ferns grew like vertical gardens, their trunks covered in flowering plants, mosses, liverworts, and smaller species of ferns. John Simmons, the club's president, pointed up at a tree fern whose base was growing from the branch of a sassafras tree about thirty feet up. He explained that the sassafras tree might have originally grown on the tree fern, but over the years, the tree put down roots and lifted the fern into the air.

Some of the tree ferns' moss-covered trunks had bizarrely contorted shapes. One was bent like a snake poised to strike; half of its trunk lay on the ground before it swooped upward. “They'll fall or be knocked over and start growing again. You can even chop a man fern off in the middle and it will reroot or sprout,” John told us, “which is why some of them are so twisty.”

Tree ferns, commonly called man ferns in Tasmania, are long-lived and very slow to develop, growing only two inches in height each year. John believed that several of the tree ferns in the gully were upwards of six hundred years old.

These tree ferns, Dicksonia antarctica, were ancient, possibly existing as a species for as long as 90 million years. And they were all over Tasmania. Yet, in the last ten years, their future had become less secure. Overseas, the tree ferns had become popular garden plants—worth $400 per yard, a height not achieved until a tree fern was thirty or forty years old— and there was an astonishing amount of poaching, with many of the stolen ferns ending up in English gardens.

Danny turned to show us a filmy fern, a nearly translucent green frond, growing off the trunk of a tree fern. Just as he was telling us that the filmy fern was only one cell thick, a land leech dropped onto his hand. We crowded around to look. It moved like a villainous black inchworm across his skin.

Ahhh, we thought, finally we meet our nemesis.

Without going through a true metamorphosis, the leech exhibited disturbing shape-shifting properties. Perched on Danny's hand, it looked like a little periscope, twisting back and forth, its head curled in an upsidedown U, searching the high seas for blood and a soft place to start chewing. It elongated its body like a living rubber band and morphed its head into a needle-sharp probe.

“Is it feeding on you?” we asked Danny hopefully.

“No, he's looking for a spot. They take quite a while to latch on— a couple of minutes.”

“That's Philaemon pungens, the smaller of Tasmania's two land leech species,” Alison interjected. Both land leech species had two jaws that worked like rasps with which they chewed through the skin and made a V-shaped incision.

In wet forests like this one, leeches could survive for months, possibly even years, without a meal, living through dry spells and all-out desiccation, until they sensed blood and dropped down on an unsuspecting donor. After a thorough blood meal, they could expand to several times their size.

“Once it attaches, it also has an anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing,” said Danny.

“How do you get it off, if it does attach?”

“You can put salt on them or you can burn them off.” Danny tossed his leech back into the forest—before it had a chance to start feeding. We remembered the famous, cringe-inducing leech scene from the 1951 movie The African Queen. The bloodsuckers cover Humphrey Bogart's body, and he and Katharine Hepburn, their hands quavering in primal fear, have to burn them off with a lit cigarette. “Filthy little devils,” Bogart curses.

The field naturalists returned to their pursuits and flipped over a rotting log. Underneath it was a riot of life. Eight-legged creatures, forty-two-legged creatures, and many with no legs at all. Alison found a millipede, but wasn't sure of the genus. Jim picked up a fast-moving