Fleas are dark brown, fast, and like to jump. They're smaller, maybe around the size of a pinhead. They're tiny, but they are visible to the naked eye, and then ticks kind of look like a distorted spider, maybe, is the best way to describe them. They've got a big old belly and itty bitty legs.

They're ectoparasites that take a blood meal from your pet for their reproductive life cycle, their day-to-day meals.

There are some over-the-counter products like foggers or bombs or things like that that you can pick up at your local hardware store or Lowe's or Home Depot or places like that. You can also work with a professional pest control company to help get rid of those fleas. But it's vital that you target that environment as well as your pet, because we see about maybe 5% of the flea population on your pet and the remaining 95% of that flea population is in your home.

No, they're not painful for your pet, but what might be more painful are some of the secondary things we see from fleas and ticks like skin infections or the itchiness or things like that. But giving them a preventative product or even giving them a regular old bath isn't painful.

Fleas go through stages. Many times what you see is the adult flea on your pet, but what they'll do is once they take a blood meal, they'll get off of your pet and into the environment. So whether that be in your carpet, couch, bedspread, or your pillows, they'll then lay their eggs. And then those eggs will go through a period of time. And then when the temperature and humidity and the light and everything like that is right, those eggs will hatch and develop into a pupal or a larval stage, and then they'll grow into the adult flea. And so what we want to make sure is that we're targeting the whole life cycle to get rid of those fleas.

The best thing to do, right Coconut, is to get them on prevention. And so we want to keep them on prevention year-round down here because the weather gets warm in the winter, so we don't see anything die off per se. And so we can make some recommendations based on the needs of your pet. But my favorite products that we have here in the clinic are going to be Simparica Trio or regular Simparica or Bravecto.

We see a lot of tick-borne diseases in this area. The most common one that people think of is Lyme's Disease, and we see plenty of Lyme's Disease cases over here. We also see things like Ehrlichiosis and Anaplasmosis—those can definitely affect your pets in this area. And then in terms of fleas, not only can they carry things like tapeworm eggs, so if your pet were to eat a flea they could get tapeworms that way. But they can also cause things like anemia if there's enough of them on your pet, because all of these nasty buggers feed on blood.