Does a flea have a mouth? Think about your answer, then read details for the real question.

I arrived at my answer the same way you did. After that, I wondered what it would look like, and moved on to the enlarged picture.

I pictured a flea, realized I didn’t really know anything about its anatomy, and then tried to imagine if it would have a mouth like a mosquito, or a more animalistic mouth. Of course, this makes me realize I don’t know much about any insect mouth. Here’s a coloured scanning electron micrograph of the head and mouth parts of the rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis.

I guess it’s a mouth. I can’t figure out how it works by looking at it. It makes me wonder what the definition of a mouth is. Anything that takes in food?

I thought as follows….

Does a flee have a mouth?

Well… it eats…

What does it eat….

I think that a flea eats blood and would therefore have a means of taking the blood from its host. What is a mouth? I thought a mouth would be described as the way through which food enters the body. In that sense a flea must have a mouth. It could however be that a flea would have something different, more specialized, like a tubular apparatus to penetrate skin and suck. I wasn’t sure if one would call such a thing its mouth.

Than I thought…. i don’t know… but it has something akin to a mouth for sure.

Does this help, Mr. Spock?

I pictured a flea, and then I pictured this .

Oh thanks @wundayatta !
Now I know why I thought of General Grievous.

I figured it’s a trick question and decided that it has probably some kind of sharp appendages and with them, it draws blood up.

Thanks everyone. So far, it sounds like i’m not the odd man out here, the Psychologist is. Thanks particularly to @wundayatta for the SEM photo. Yep, it’s got a mouth, and the next time I think about one, I probably will visualize it. @Simone_De_Beauvoir That’s why I put that last paragraph in about what to call the thing. A mosquito’s eating appendage is often called a proboscis so that’s a legitimate worry. Still, you approached it logically and not visually. Now that we’ve seen the SEM image @wundayatta‘s link, I’m much more comfortable calling it a mouth than the thing the mosquito eats through.

Let’s hear it for fleas!
They do have a point.

Your “scientist” is just an idiot. Minds do stuff sometimes. If it bothers you, correct it.

Visualization is one valid method of finding an answer to a question. It is used more by some people than deductive logic. There are different styles of problem solving. If you know what insect mouth parts look like, using the image would be very efficient.

Does your loved one have pendulous earlobes or attached earlobes? Try and reason that one out logically!

I’m with Dr. Visualization. Tried to picture a flea, couldn’t picture its mouth. Almost googled but decided that would be cheating.

I thought, well, it’s a living thing, so it has to have a way to take in nutrition. What class of things does it belong to? It probably belongs to the class of things that have a proboscis. So most likely it doesn’t have what I regard as a mouth, but it most certainly has an orifice for eating.

Practically all multicellular animals—even primitive, microscopic ones—have some kind of digestive tract where food goes in one end (the mouth) and comes out, after absorption of nutrients, at the other end (the anus). It’s a pretty reliable generalization.

Of course the “mouth” might not resemble anything like a human mouth. But there’s an external opening for stuff to enter the body.

I considered the question basically the way you did. I knew or believed that fleas live on blood from their hosts, then I pictured what that would look like. My mind picture is of an insect with one or two “fangs” to suck blood. Now I am going to look it up to see how close I am. I’ll bet back to you on that.

I did what you did. “Fleas suck blood, so it has to have some kind of mouth. And people always say ‘I got bitten by a flea’, so they must have one.” And then I tried to picture it and I have no idea what kind of mouth a flea would have.

first i imagined the creature, then reasoned on how or what a flea is known to eat. unfortunately, i wasn’t sure what a flea eats. but I vaguely remember expressions of them biting. On my enlarged flea, I imagined a mouth of sorts that may not look like a human mouth.

@ETpro here is what I found http://www.yourfamilyshealth.com/family_health/pets/fleas/
There was another one that showed an electron microscope of one but I couldn’t see a mouth either. I would say that my inital assumption was correct and there is nothing wrong with your way of thinking.

@wilma I saw the picture, you live in a very frightening world but I be it’s fun too.

I thought about it. I knew that they suck blood somehow, and thought they probably do, but the existence of the question coming from someone made me wonder if they had something technically different from a mouth. I also considered that they’re generally too small and too fast/evasive to see a mouth well if they had one. Like maybe they just have a tube or something. Then I noticed I didn’t know, considered looking for an article, and decided again to look and see and that it would be funny to post this potential spoiler . :-)

I just Google stuff I don’t know – if it tweaks my curiosity. The details part of Q was interesting, though. I am not very visual. I would prefer being told something, or reading about it.

This question was about thought process, not about fleas.

@Dr_Lawrence Almost attached. Just the tiniest hint of a dip. Quite cute. And yes, that’s a perfect example of a question you have to use visualization to answer. I think that the good doctor in the book just picked a terrible example to illustrate his point, because most of us have no earthly idea what a flea’s face looks like.

@Ron_C & @Jeruba After looking at @wundayatta SEM of the critter’s face, it appears to have two opposing fangs that it uses to generate the bleeding and an opening to suck up its bloody reward. It’s quite different than the defined proboscis a mosquito uses to feast on us.

@ETpro good to know but I was much happier when they were just little black spots on my dogs belly.

@Ron_C Your dog will probably be eternally grateful that you now know how creepy and detestable they look.

Yes, but @ETpro, that doesn’t matter, does it? Wasn’t the question about thought process? I might have hazarded a wrong guess, but I didn’t imagine using a mental zoom lens on a flea’s face. I reasoned from what I knew.

@Jeruba Yes, thanks for bringing it back on topic. Speaking of thought processes, don;‘t you find it interesting how many people responded without answering the OP question. Even setting aside banter back and forth about an answer, there are still quite a few who gave no indication how they decided whether a flea has a mouth or not. :-)

Not so interesting any more, @ETpro, since I’ve come to the point of being surprised when people do read the details.

haha, there’s an anti-poll attitude on fluther. some polls however are amazing. i think this counts as a great one. the ones that didn’t answer the poll are the ones that made this thread acceptable for the mods to leave it be. :)

I came to my answer to your “Does a flea have a mouth?” question not by visualization; (I already knew a flea has a mouth), so my first response was yes. Then I visualized a flea and then General Grievous, (Star Wars villain) came to my mind. I think the reason that he did was that after I thought of the flea, I was focused on what his mouth looked like and then that brought me to General Grievous, because I think he looks like a huge flea.
So I used visualization, but it was after the fact?

I think visually and would look for something resembling a mouth where I expect a mouth to be.