The French team of Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc garnered the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize in biology for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat. Now comes further flea news, this time from the University of Cambridge (Thanks to investigator Francis Treuhertz for bringing this to our attention.):
“Biomechanics of jumping in the flea“, Gregory P. Sutton and Malcolm Burrows, Journal of Experimental Biology, 214, 836-847 (2011).
Joe Palca, reporting on this for NPR, translates into people-ese:
Itching To Know How Fleas Flee? Mystery Solved
A 40-year-old controversy about how a flea jumps has now been resolved: Fleas take off from their feet, not from their knees….
[Gregory Sutton of the University of Cambridge] has studied how insects like locusts use their legs to make their extraordinary leaps. But fleas’ legs are under their bodies, unlike locusts, whose legs are out to the side. “So I wanted to see how fleas control which direction they jump,” he says.