Pull your socks up, early fall is flea season
Flea bites can cause irritation and serious allergic reactions in animals and humans. The most common flea found in home and school environments, the cat flea (Ctenocephalides felis), can carry or transmit tapeworms, as well as the organisms that cause bubonic plague and murine typhus.
Even if no pets are kept in a household, family and visitors can bring in adult fleas on their clothing without even realizing it. Urban wildlife, such as feral cats, squirrels and birds, can also be a source of infestation as well.
Identification and biology
Adult cat fleas are small (1/16 inch long), oval, wingless, reddish-brown to black insects with powerful hind legs. After mating and feeding, adult females lay oval, white eggs that fall into cracks, crevices, carpet, bedding or lawn covering. A mature female can lay up to 25 eggs a day for three weeks.
Within 48 hours, wormlike larvae hatch. Larvae feed primarily on “flea dirt” (adult flea feces, which is relatively undigested dried blood) that falls from the host’s fur.
They develop in areas protected from rain and sun, where the relative humidity is at least 70 percent and the temperature is 70ºF to 90ºF. So they like Indian summer in particular.
In eight to 24 days the larvae spin cocoons in which they will develop into adults. Under optimal conditions, new adults are ready to emerge from their cocoons within two weeks, but they can remain in their cocoons up to a year. Vibrations stimulate them to emerge.
As soon as adults emerge, they look for a blood meal. Adults can live a month or two without a meal and up to six months with one.
These variations in flea development time account for the sudden appearance of large numbers of adult fleas in “flea season,” usually in the late summer and early fall.
The flea population has been building up all year long in the form of eggs, larvae and pupae (cocoons), but rapid development into biting adults cannot be completed until the temperature and humidity are optimal and host cues signal adults to emerge. This is usually at the end of a long spell of hot weather, the summer, and continuing into the fall, especially if there is an indian summer.