Friends of the flea scratch together

Press, 7 July 1977, Page 14

Friends of the flea scratch together

By

PHILIP NORMAN,

“Sunday Tinies.” London

The first international flea conference has been held, m the middle of a Rothschild country estate in Northamptonshire. A hundred flea experts from 15 countries assembled in a darkened rootn to present papers and to exchange data concerning the object of their peculiar devotion. The delegates also included a tick and mite exexpert or two, as well as the world’s foremost authority on the ovaries of the fruit fly.

Miriam Rothschild organised the conference and let her neo-Tudor mansion, Ashton World. near Oundle, for its four-day programme. The delegates, billeted in the village, went up to the big house each day. In a room surrounded by ancestral portraits, monographs and slide-shows were presented on such varied topics as Rickettsia in Flea Tissue; Floating or Missing Genitalia in Male Fleas; Unusual Alaskan Fleas; Fleas in History; and The Wonderful One-host Flea, a poem. Fleas, on the whole, have had a bad press. This is due largely to their ability to spread diseases, such as murine typhus, myxomatosis. and bubonic plague, the latter by means

of the equally unadmired plague rat. Plague remains endemic in countries such as Vietnam and New Guinea, as well as smouldering quietly, often noninfectiously, on rats’ backs in American national parks. The World Health Organisation received 700 reports of plague last year. Many more are likely to have gone unreported, or to have been suppressed by the governments concerned for the sake of political vanity. Yet. the flea has its grudging admirers. Naturalists w'ho study it are impressed by its perfect integration with the bloodcarrying world. Fleas have remained unchanged for millions of years, since their wings were taken

from them. Specimens preserved in amber or in burial mounds are identical with twentieth century fleas. Two thousand types of flea are known to exist, riding on all fur-bearing land animals except monkeys. One flea even contrives to dwell at the South Pole, where it exists frozen live into the ice for nine months each year. The profile of the flea, in scientific pamphlets and drawings, brooded over its first international conference. A flea’s face is striking rather than beautiful, resembling a Red Indian chief with long whiskers and old-fashioned motor goggles. It compensates for its plainness by performance. When a flea jumps, it is as if a man on

his knees has leapt to the top of the Post. Office tower (250 ft 30,000 times without tiring. Their acceleration has been measured at 20 times the rate at which a Moon rocket re-enters the earth’s atmosphere. The entry of Mirian Rothschild into the con-

ference room proved, in its way, to be equally striking. She is a grey-haired, brown-skinned woman dressed in multi-coloured peasant clothes, yellow and black gumboots, and seaman’s socks. She is not merely a Rothschild, but

is also a naturalist, in the forefront of flea-study. Live plague fleas, at this very moment, are breeding contentedly in her cellars. The setting was not inappropriate. For the Rothschild family bred a formidable line of naturalists — outside banking hours. The Hon Charles Rothschild,

Miriam’s father, in a short but crowded life, became a world authority on butterflies, irises, and fleas. In Egypt, he discovered the plague-carrying rat aea, which he named Xenopsylla Cheopis Rothschild, after the builder of the Pyramids.

His daughter is a worthy successor. It was Miriam who discovered that the rabbit flea breeds in unison with its host. Part of the proof consisted of giving a contraceptive pill to a female rabbit; the pill also curtailed the breeding of the fleas in the rabbit’s ears. She was the first to analyse the flea’s miraculous jumping mechanism, with the help of a camera capable of recording 10,000 frames a second. Like all flea people, she has a curious affection for the creatures. Their study is helpful, not only in checking disease but" also in the wider understanding of all biology. In tire flea world, it is a compliment to name a new species after a fellow expert whom

one admires. “I’ve got a nice little worm named after me and a nice little flea named after me,” she said. “Almost all the people at this conference have a flea or a tick named after them.’’ Miriam climbed into her crumpled brown limousine for the next stage of the programme. The car bumped along through part of a 500-acre nature reserve, where tree stumps are not removed but left, so that insects may breed in them. This is not a big estate, she says — nothing in comparison with “the locals,” as Miriam calls her neighbours. Lord Fitzwilliam and the Duke of Gloucester, both of whom have sent her rabbit fleas. At a supper party on the Wednesday, one visitor

boasted that he had never yet been bitten by a flea. A contest was immediately arranged between the visitor and Dr Norman Granz, of the World Health

Organisation, to see who would be bitten the most by some cat fleas that happened to be handy. Dr Granz was the winner — by six bites to five.