In flea control, one flea is one flea too many
October 17th, 2009 | 
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Many flea control problems have started with “just one flea”. It can be so easy to ignore that single little parasite. After all, one flea is no big deal right? That’s where so many people go wrong. If you can see even a single flea, then you are already on the back foot in the fight against fleas. In this article I will explain how even one flea is one flea too many.
Finding one flea is only the tip of the iceberg. You may be aware that adult fleas make up only 5% of the flea population, so seeing one flea means that there will be at least another 19 fleas in various stages of development in the environment. Not only that, it has been found that when we are looking for fleas on our pets that we only find 5 to 15% of the number of fleas on the pet. That means that if you find one adult flea on your pet, there could be as many as twenty! For the purposes of this example, we will assume that one visible flea means 10 fleas living on the host.
Adult fleas will lay 37 eggs per day on average, for up to 100 days. If there are 10 fleas living on your pet, then that means that they are laying 370 eggs every day, which are falling off your pet, contaminating the environment. If you see a flea on your pet, in two weeks time there could be over 5000 eggs in the environment. In ideal conditions, the flea can complete its life cycle in around 14 days. Even if only one in a hundred eggs survive to adulthood, you could be looking at an extra 90 fleas on your pet in as little as three weeks, with new fleas hatching every day. After four weeks from seeing that one flea, you could have 460 fleas on your pet, and over one hundred thousand flea eggs in the environment.
As you can see the numbers start to get pretty scary. These numbers of course don’t take into account any fleas killed by your pet’s grooming or anything else like that, but you can see that it doesn’t take much for the flea population to explode.
Just think – all of that damage can come from seeing just one flea. As you can see, if you see even one flea on your pet then you need to start flea control straight away. If you wait even a month then your flea problem could grow into a massive issue that will take months to get back under control. If you want to avoid this situation altogether, then it is best to get a head start on the fleas and start using a monthly flea control product to kill fleas before they can become a problem.
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