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Fleas are wingless insects, 1.5 to 3.3 millimetres (1 ⁄ 16 to 1 ⁄ 8 inch) long, that are agile, usually dark colored (for example, the reddish-brown of the cat flea), with a proboscis, or stylet, adapted to feeding by piercing the skin and sucking their host's blood through their epipharynx.
There are more than 2,000 species of tiny (0.04 to 0.15 inches), wingless, blood-sucking fleas that live on the body of the host they infest. Although fleas cannot fly, they have developed ...
When the larva is mature it makes a silken cocoon around itself and pupates. The flea remains a pupa from one week to six months changing in a process called metamorphosis. When the flea emerges, it begins the final cycle, called the adult stage. A flea can now suck blood from hosts and mate with other fleas.
Both said fleas are not a diagnosis of a household's cleanliness but of sheer bad luck. The pests live in four life stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult fleas, according to the Centers for Disease ...
Cat fleas originated in Africa [4] but can now be found globally. [5] As humans began domesticating cats, the prevalence of the cat flea increased and it spread throughout the world. Of the cat fleas, Ctenocephalides felis felis is the most common, although other subspecies do exist, including C. felis strongylus, C. orientis, and C. damarensis ...
This is unique in that most fleas go through three. Over the course of that development, the flea will first decrease in size from its just-hatched size of 1.5 mm to 1.15 mm (first instar) before growing to 2.9 mm (second instar). About six to eight days after hatching, the larva pupates and builds a cocoon around itself.
Don't let fleas take over your house. Follow these expert tips on how to get rid of fleas on pets (dogs included!), furniture, bedding and even in your yard.
Order Siphonaptera, fleas, believed to have had winged ancestors; Order Phthiraptera, lice, a wingless order under the winged superorder Exopterygota; Family Trichogrammatidae, parasitic wasps, some species of which have wingless males that mate and die inside the host egg; Order Notoptera