Flea Facts

All You Wanted to Know About Fleas and More

Everyone knows fleas aren't fun. However, here are some flea facts that will amaze you!

• Flea fossils date back to the Lower Cretaceous period, meaning fleas have been around for about 100 million years. At that time, fleas may have infested a Tyrannosaurus Rex or Triceratops!
• Fleas can jump up to 150 times their own length. To put that into perspective, if a human competed in the Olympic long jump with that ability, that athlete would certainly win the gold medal with a gravity-defying 1,000 foot long jump. So they can easily jump onto your pet from the ground, or from another pet.
• On average, a flea's 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.
• The female flea can lay 2,000 eggs in her lifetime. That means that if all 53 million dogs in the United States each hosted a population of 60 fleas, the U.S. would house more than six trillion flea eggs. Laid end-to-end, those eggs would stretch around the world more than 76 times! It's important to kill fleas before they get a chance to lay eggs. Advantage kills 98-100 percent of fleas within 12 hours, before they start laying eggs.
• The female flea consumes 15 times her own body weight in blood daily.
• The largest recorded flea is the North American Hystrichopsylla schefferi. Found in beavers, it can measure 12mm in length - almost 1/2-inch!
• A flea can bite 400 times a day¹. That's a rate of 4,000 bites a day if your pet has just 10 fleas.