Bloodsucking is a flea’s specialty. But they are also noted jumpers with a unique propulsion system that makes possible awesome leaps of 150 times their own length–vertically or horizontally. (This is equivalent to a human jumping nearly a thousand feet, or 300 meters.) Fleas have been called insects that fly with their legs.
Fleas can also:
* accelerate 50 times faster than the space shuttle;
* remain frozen for a year, then revive;
* go without feeding for months and survive;
* propel themselves in the air and snag a passing host with legs that are covered with bristles and tipped with hooks.
Fleas also love dogs and cats but dogs and cats certainly do not like them.
A few of the 2,400 species of fleas are blamed for transmitting the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages. As many as 40 million people died during the more than two centuries beginning in A.D. 541, when the first pandemic struck the Byzantine Empire.
After six plague-free centuries, bubonic plague returned with a vengeance in 1346, killing 25 million people in Europe by 1352. For the next four centuries, the plague reappeared every 17 to 25 years. No one knew the cause of the plague, so many misconceptions were conceived. For instance, a favorite nursery rhyme that children recite today can be traced from this tragic time: “Ring around the rosies, A pocket full of posies, Achoo! Achoo! We all fall down.”
What were the rosies? A pink rash associated with the plague. Posies were the flowers carried because “corrupt vapors” were thought to cause the plague. Now that we know that the rhyme is about illness, it is obvious that “Achoo, Achoo!” means sneezing, due to chills. Finally, the end of the rhyme explains that all fall down in death.
Finally, during the third bubonic plague pandemic in the late 1880s, it was found that the infection was transmitted by certain kinds of fleas who bit rodents that were infected with a specific kind of bacteria. The rats could not spread the disease directly to humans, but the fleas, which fed on rats, could. How? When the rats died from the disease, the fleas jumped on human hosts. As fleas sucked human blood, they discharged the bacteria into the human body.
FAMILY: Pulcidae
GENUS: Ctenocephalides
SPECIES: (Various)