Chigoe flea
The chigoe flea is one of the smallest fleas, only about 1 millimetre long. It lives in warm, sandy places. The grown-up female does something unusual: she digs into the skin of an animal or a person and stays there.
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Fun facts
Inside the skin, the female can swell up to 80 times her starting size.
Its young live 2 to 5 centimetres under the sand, where it is not too hot and not too airless.
It is often mixed up with chiggers, but chiggers are tiny mites, not fleas.
Fewer people get it in the rainy season, because rain disturbs its sand homes.
It uses grains of sand to strengthen the cocoon it makes before turning into a flea.
Most asked questions about Chigoe flea
?Are jiggers and chiggers the same?
No. A jigger is a tiny flea, and a chigger is a tiny mite, a cousin of spiders.
?Where does the chigoe flea live?
In warm, sandy places in Central and South America and in Africa south of the Sahara.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Tunga penetrans
- Group
- Other insects
- Family
- Tungidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Siphonaptera > Tungidae
- Lives on
- South America, North America, Africa
- Also known as
- Jigger, Sand flea, Burrowing flea, Chigoe
Where the facts come from
- Tunga penetrans (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by British Museum of Natural History. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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