Reader of Entrails: 🧪 Cursed knowledge time! There is a species of flea, Uropsylla tasmanica, whose larvae CHEW their way into hosts and then just burrow around in the skin eating tissue & molting to larger instars until pupating & turning into an adult flea that lives on the skin. It’s from Australia, of course.

🧪 Cursed knowledge time! There is a species of flea, Uropsylla tasmanica, whose larvae CHEW their way into hosts and then just burrow around in the skin eating tissue & molting to larger instars until pupating & turning into an adult flea that lives on the skin. It’s from Australia, of course.

Ectoparasites and Skin Lesions in Wild-Caught Spotted-Tailed Quoll (<span class="genus-species">Dasyurus maculatus</span>) (Marsupialia: Dasyuridae)bioone.org Ectoparasites were collected from 32 wild spotted-tailed quolls (Dasyurus maculatus) trapped in the Tuggolo State Forest, New South Wales, Australia, during February and March 2005. Species collected ...

It eats quolls, Tasmanian devils, and other Dasyurids.

I thought my rabbit getting bird fleas was bad.

Overachieving in the wrong direction!

Australia seems lovely, but as someone who’s already been bitten by brown recluses twice, I’m not risking my luck.

You have terrible venomous creature luck, and I can see why you might think Australia is not for you 😂.

And those spider bites were at a thrift store and the store room at The Gap, so I have bad luck in very mundane places. I also now have a real fear of spiders, so even the giant Australian ones that don’t bite would have me screaming. And knowing there are fleas that burrow into your skin? Nope.

I support your caution for the spiders, but unless you are secretly a quoll, you are safe from the burrowing flea larvae. Small mercies. 😨

A smarter way to reproduce than other fleas, which involves hoping that you dropped your eggs someplace where a host will come.

It is brilliant, and I do not approve at ALL. The histopathology is cool, but the absolute creeping horror for these poor hosts. It must itch like the dickens.

Chiggers reach down into the dermis, though by the time the itch starts the larvae are gone; they must suppress histamine somehow. If these fleas stick to eating the epidermis they might avoid activating the immune system, obviously an advantage to them.

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