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Can fleas fly? How do they travel?
Can fleas fly? How do they travel?
These tiny blood-sucking parasites that cause your pets so much pain actually don’t have wings, they are very tiny wingless and flightless insects. There are about 2500 species of fleas, and they all belong to the order Siphonaptera which is a group of wingless ectoparasites that survive by drinking blood from animals. Fleas are famous for the very itchy bites they deliver, these bloodsuckers will infest an animal, live within the animal’s fur biting and sucking their blood. Despite that these insects are flightless, they have the ability to move very fast and you’ll notice this if you have ever tried to catch one.
How can fleas move quickly without wings?
Fleas have flat scaly reddish-brown bodies with three pairs of legs. They have no wings and are flightless, but they have legs that are well-adapted for jumping. Like most other insects, fleas use their legs to crawl and move around. Four of these legs are attached to the side of their bodies and enable the insects to crawl around, while two hind legs positioned behind are specially-adapted for jumping. Fleas have an incredible jumping ability; these insects are one of the most phenomenal jumpers in the entire animal kingdom. Their 2.5 mm tiny bodies can leap up to 8 inches into the air and cover a distance of up to 13 inches in a single leap, this is equivalent to a human jumping over 900 feet.
With this unusual jumping ability, fleas are able to move very fast and jump from place to place. A flea can jump from off the ground and land on the body of a potential host to feed, they can also jump from one side of an animal to another or from one animal to another.
How do fleas jump so fast?
Since fleas are so small and their tiny legs do not have enough muscle power to lift them off the ground, how are they able to jump so high and so far? This has puzzled scientists for ages and in a bid to understand the science behind the ability and mechanics of jumping in fleas, scientists have extensively studied the fleas amazing jumping feat. And here’s what they found. The hind legs of fleas have an elastic pad made of a protein called resilin which acts like a tensed spring.
Fleas release this tensed spring when they want to jump and it catapults them into the air and throws them several inches away from their initial position. And when they land, they are able to grip the surface with tiny claws at the tip of their legs. Despite their incredible jumping ability, fleas prefer to stay glued to a particular host for as long as they live and they don’t jump around very often.
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