Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Cat flea

Some of my colleagues have just found a new species of cat fleas. Actually, what they initially believed was one species turned out to be two of them.

Cat fleas (Ctenocephalides felis) are tiny blood-small sucking insects found mostly on cats, but also on dogs. So, if you dog has fleas for some reason those are actually cat fleas. 

The life cycle of a flea is very like that of a butterfly, but unlike the beautiful end result of those flower-friendly creatures, the adult flea is a menace to all it encounters. 

A flea can jump 33 cm in one leap which makes it one of the best jumpers of all animals as they can jump about 100 times their own height. For comparison - the long jump world record for humans is 8.95m so about 5 times the height of the athlete.

Fleas exist already for at least 165 Million years which means that some of today’s flea’s ancestors might have bitten a lot of dinosaurs.

No comments:

Post a Comment