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Concept
Flea
Summary
Flea, the common name for the order Siphonaptera, includes 2,500 species of small flightless insects that live as external parasites of mammals and birds. Fleas live by ingesting the blood of their hosts. Adult fleas grow to about long, are usually brown, and have bodies that are "flattened" sideways or narrow, enabling them to move through their hosts' fur or feathers. They lack wings; their hind legs are extremely well adapted for jumping. Their claws keep them from being dislodged, and their mouthparts are adapted for piercing skin and sucking blood. They can leap 50 times their body length, a feat second only to jumps made by another group of insects, the superfamily of froghoppers. Flea larvae are worm-like, with no limbs; they have chewing mouthparts and feed on organic debris left on their hosts' skin.
Genetic evidence indicates that fleas are a specialised lineage of parasitic scorpionflies (Mecoptera) sensu lato, most closely related to the family Nannochoristidae. The earliest known fleas lived in the Middle Jurassic; modern-looking forms appeared in the Cenozoic. Fleas probably originated on mammals first and expanded their reach to birds. Each species of flea specializes, more or less, on one species of host: many species of flea never breed on any other host; some are less selective. Some families of fleas are exclusive to a single host group; for example, the Malacopsyllidae are found only on armadillos, the Ischnopsyllidae only on bats, and the Chimaeropsyllidae only on elephant shrews.
The oriental rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, is a vector of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. The disease was spread to humans by rodents, such as the black rat, which were bitten by infected fleas. Major outbreaks included the Plague of Justinian, about 540, and the Black Death, about 1350, each of which killed a sizeable fraction of the world's people.
Fleas appear in human culture in such diverse forms as flea circuses; poems, such as John Donne's erotic "The Flea"; works of music, such as those by Modest Mussorgsky; and a film by Charlie Chaplin.
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Ontological neighbourhood
Related publications (3)
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Les 10 et 11 janvier 2013, la conférence et les séries de discussion “Let’s talk about...” auront lieu dans le cadre du salon HEIMTEXTIL à Francfort, Allemagne. Des architectes et designers d’intérieur renommés présenteront leurs futurs projets et idées su ...
2013Plague outbreaks in prairie dog populations explained by percolation thresholds of alternate host abundance
Highly lethal pathogens (e.g., hantaviruses, hendra virus, anthrax, or plague) pose unique public-health problems, because they seem to periodically flare into outbreaks before disappearing into long quiescent phases. A key element to their possible contro ...
2010A miniaturized continuous dielectrophoretic cell sorter and its applications
Philippe Renaud, Thomas Michael Braschler, Nicolas Demierre, Ana Valero
There is great interest in highly sensitive separation methods capable of quickly isolating a particular cell type within a single manipulation step prior to their analysis. We present a cell sorting device based on the opposition of dielectrophoretic forc ...
American Institute of Physics2010Related concepts (19)
Insect
Insects (from Latin insectum) are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (head, thorax and abdomen), three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes and one pair of antennae. Their blood is not totally contained in vessels; some circulates in an open cavity known as the haemocoel. Insects are the most diverse group of animals; they include more than a million described species and represent more than half of all known living organisms.
Epidemic typhus
Epidemic typhus, also known as louse-borne typhus, is a form of typhus so named because the disease often causes epidemics following wars and natural disasters where civil life is disrupted. Epidemic typhus is spread to people through contact with infected body lice, in contrast to endemic typhus which is usually transmitted by fleas. Though typhus has been responsible for millions of deaths throughout history, it is still considered a rare disease that occurs mainly in populations that suffer unhygienic extreme overcrowding.
Louse
Louse (: lice) is the common name for any member of the clade Phthiraptera, which contains nearly 5,000 species of wingless parasitic insects. Phthiraptera has variously been recognized as an order, infraorder, or a parvorder, as a result of developments in phylogenetic research. Lice are obligate parasites, living externally on warm-blooded hosts which include every species of bird and mammal, except for monotremes, pangolins, and bats. Lice are vectors of diseases such as typhus.