Flea Facts
A healthy animal has very few fleas, and those that are on the skin will not cause skin eruptions, redness, hair loss and severe itching.
An allergic reaction develops with an impaired immune system and one that has been sensitised with exposure to fleas. So it is obvious that prevention is the key to a healthy pet. Pawtect provides a field of protection around your pet designed to support keeping fleas, ticks, sandflies and mosquitos at bay.
Did you know?
- A flea can bite 400 times per day. That’s 4000 bites a day if your pet has just 10 fleas!
- An average flea lifespan is two to three months. However, pre-emerged fleas (not living on a pet) can survive undisturbed and without a blood meal for more than 100 days.
- Fleas can jump up to 150 times their own length so they can easily jump onto your pet from the ground, or from another pet.
- The female flea consumes 15 times her own body weight in blood daily.
The best flea control is always flea prevention.
- Fleas can transmit tapeworms, bacteria and other disease forming organisms to pets as well as humans.
- A pair of fleas may produce 20,000 fleas in three months! So to protect your home from flea infestation, early prevention is the key.
- We love our pets and would do anything to prevent discomfort, right? Seeing our pets scratch and bite at themselves because of flea bites tears at our heartstrings. And when our pets can’t sleep because they are so uncomfortable, we realise that all of these discomforts could have been prevented early on.
What is the life cycle of a flea?
- A flea has four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. Fleas take about a month to grow from egg to adult.
- The female adult flea lays her eggs about two days after she mates and the eggs take an additional 2-6 days to hatch into larvae.
- Flea eggs are not sticky and tend to fall onto places your pet rests or sleeps. These hatch into larvae which feed off “flea dirt.” This is actually the mother flea’s feces.
- In about a week, they start spinning a cocoon. The cocooned larva, now called a pupa, is now resistant to dangers that could kill the flea in other stages of its life cycle.
- Under normal circumstances, the cocooned pupa remains in this state for about 15 days; it can extend this time up to one year if the environment is hostile (i.e., too cold).