TaxonomyIn C. felis there are four recognized subspecies throughout the world, all of which are primarily parasites of carnivores (Lewis 1972; Hopkins and Rothschild 1953). C. felis damarensis and C. felis strongylus are restricted to Africa, C. felis orientis is found in southeast Asia and the East Indies (Lewis 1972), primarily infesting cattle, sheep and goats whereas the first two are found as parasites of wild carnivores (Dryden 1993). C. felis felis is found worldwide on many species of wild and domesticated animals (Rust and Dryden 1997). It is the only subspecies that occurs in North America (Dryden 1993) and is often only referred to as C. felis, also throughout this book. C. felis felis was probably introduced quite recently into Europe when domestic cats were imported at the time of the Crusades (Petter 1973; Beaucournu 1990). Believed to originate from Africa, the so-called ‘cat flea’ C. felis is now cosmopolitan, ranging from warm tropical areas to temperate zones with prolonged subfreezing temperatures (Lewis 1972). New investigations in the field of taxonomic differentiation by using the phallosome structures as identification key propose the status of C. orientis and C. damarensis as a full species (Ménier and Beaucournu 1998) and confirm among others the findings of Haeselbarth (1966) concerning C. orientis and Beaucournu (1975) concerning C. damarensis against all controversies. The morphological differentiation between C. felis and C. canis as well as some other major flea species is given in Fig. 2, Fig. 3 and Table 2.
Fig. 2: Morphological differentiation of the cat flea (C.felis) and the dog flea (C.canis) original size upper right: 3.0 mm
Table 2. General morphological differentiation using the presence or abseoce of pronotal and genal combs in fleas
References
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