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 If you have seen one flea on your dog or cat, he has fleas. In almost all cases, there are many more fleas unseen than seen. You can check for flea dirt, which looks like pepper scattered through the coat, but it is actually tiny specks of dried blood left by fleas when they bite your pet. There's a very simple test to see if your pet has fleas. Just comb through your pet's coat onto a wet piece of paper towel. If the specks falling onto the paper turn red, your pet has fleas! Another very simple test to see if a particular room is infested is: Wear white socks into a room that you suspect has fleas. Since fleas are attracted to vibrations, your footsteps will cause them to jump toward you looking for a host,especially if the pets haven't been in there for awhile! With white socks, you will see the tiny fleas that gather. The adult fleas that you find are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the flea population! This simple test is not designed for flea control, but if you find more than about five fleas in a single room, you probably have a major infestation to deal with. Completion of the life cycle from egg to adult varies from two weeks to eight months. Normally the female flea lays about 15 to 20 eggs per day up to 600 in a lifetime. While the usual hosts for fleas are dogs, cats, rats, rabbits, mice, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, opossums, foxes, and chickens, but they certainly don't mind a human if nothing else is around! Eggs loosely laid in the hair, drop out where the pet rests, sleeps or nests (rugs, carpets, upholstered furniture, cat or dog boxes, kennels, sand boxes, etc.) Eggs hatch in two days to two weeks into larvae found indoors in floor cracks crevices, along baseboards, under rug edges and in furniture or beds. Outdoor development occurs in sandy gravel soils like your kid's moist sand box, the dirt crawlspace under your house and under your shrubs as well. Larvae are blind, avoid light, pass through three larval stages and take a week to several months to develop. Their food consists of digested blood from adult flea feces, dead skin, hair, feathers, and other organic debris. (Larvae do not suck blood.) Pupae mature to adulthood within a silken cocoon woven by the larva to which pet hair, carpet fiber, dust, grass cuttings, and other debris adheres. In about five to fourteen days, adult fleas can emerge or may remain resting in the cocoon until the detection of vibration or (remember the test we mentioned earlier?), pressure (host animal lying down on them), heat, noise, or carbon dioxide (meaning a potential blood source is near). Adult fleas cannot survive or lay eggs without a blood meal, but may hibernate from two months to one year without feeding. Planning a vacation? The house has been empty with no cat or dog around for fleas to feed on. When you and your pets are gone, flea eggs hatch and larvae pupate. The adult fleas fully developed inside the pupal cocoon remains in a kind of limbo for a long time until a blood source is near. Your family returning from vacation is immediately attacked by waiting hungry hordes of fleas! (In just 30 days, 10 female fleas under ideal conditions can multiply to over a quarter million different life stages. Newly emerged adult fleas live only about one week if a blood meal is not obtained. Optimum temperatures for the flea's life cycle are 70°F to 85°F and optimum humidity is 70 percent. |
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