BIG ENCYCLOPEDIA FOR CHILDREN AND ADULTS
Who are fleas? Detailed answer Directory / Big encyclopedia. Questions for quiz and self-education Did you know? Who are the fleas? We all know that fleas are tiny creatures that live in the skin of dogs and make them constantly itch. But did you know that there are about nine hundred varieties of fleas? Fleas are parasitic insects. This means that they live on other living beings. They live on mammals, including humans, as well as on birds and other animals. After flies, fleas are the most unpleasant insects familiar to man. They have been able to so thoroughly infiltrate the life of people around the world due to the fact that they parasitize on domestic animals and their owners since time immemorial. The bite of a flea is quite unpleasant in itself, but this is far from the main reason why they should be feared. Fleas can carry very serious diseases, such as typhus and bubonic plague, which can lead to death. Fleas lay small eggs directly on the body of the animal they live on, or in the place where this animal sleeps. The testicles are scattered everywhere with the movements of the animal. The larvae hatched from the testicles, growing up, weave a cocoon for themselves, from which an adult flea eventually emerges. The entire process of development from an egg to an adult insect in a human flea takes from twenty-eight to forty-eight days. For the tropical rat flea, it takes only twenty-one days. The adult flea has no wings. But on the other hand, she has very well developed legs with which she jumps, and some types of fleas are wonderful jumpers. Some of them are able to jump twenty centimeters in height and as much as thirty in length! The mouth parts of the flea are adapted to bite the skin of other animals and suck blood, which is their only food. Her very body is flat. Fleas abound in tropical and warm regions, but these parasites can also live at the poles and in deserts. In North America, the most common flea species are the human flea, dog flea, and cat flea. All these three species can parasitize, regardless of their species, on humans, and on dogs, and on cats, and on other animals. Author: Likum A. Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia: Where do buns grow on trees? "Who would have thought, Your Excellency, that human food, in its original form, flies, swims and grows on trees?" - one general was surprised in the famous fairy tale by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. "Yes," answered another general, "to confess, and I still thought that the rolls would be born in the same form as they are served with coffee in the morning!" Contrary to the obvious sarcasm of the author of the tale, the generals were not so wrong in their judgments. At the end of the XNUMXth century, the English navigator William Dampier told Europeans about a curious tree whose fruits served as a substitute for bread for the natives: "They (the fruits) are as large as a loaf of bread worth a penny, baked from flour worth five shillings per bushel. The inhabitants bake them in the hearth until the crust turns black, then the crust is removed, and under the delicate thin skin there remains a soft white pulp, similar to crumbly bread. There are no stony inclusions. But if the pulp is not eaten immediately, then after a day it becomes stale and becomes inedible. " The tree that Dampier spoke of is called breadfruit - like all other types of trees (there are about 50 of them) of the genus Artocarpus of the mulberry family. These well-known food plants of the tropics were mentioned in the manuscripts of the ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus and later Pliny. Polynesia is considered the birthplace of the common breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis), but it is currently grown in almost all countries of Southeast Asia, Oceania and other areas of the tropics. This tree reaches 35 meters in height and 1 meter in diameter. Usually breadfruit trees bear fruit for nine months of the year, and then rest for three months. And so for 70-75 years. On one tree annually 700-800 "breads" weighing 3-4 kilograms each ripen. Fully ripened fruits have a pasty, sweetish pulp that tastes more like potatoes than bread. But you need to eat this pulp quickly, otherwise it will become tasteless in a day. Breadfruit seeds are roasted like chestnuts. And the fruits are canned, baked, boiled, fried, dried and eaten raw. The easiest cooking method is fire treatment. Freshly picked, still green fruits are buried in ashes and baked in a fire like potatoes. After 10-15 minutes, the green crust turns black, cracks, and a milky-white inside peeps through the cracks, which tastes like sweetish wheat bread. The inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands usually crush the peeled and cored fruits in a mortar, turning them into a homogeneous mass, to which coconut juice is added to improve the taste. Then the mass is divided into briquettes, wrapped in several layers of leaves, tightly tied with bark fibers and buried in large pits, from where they are subsequently removed as needed. In the ground, such semi-finished products can lie for years, becoming even tastier with time. Prepare them in the following way. The bottom of the pit is lined with stones and a large fire is lit. When the stones are warm enough, the ashes are raked out, the bottom is covered with a layer of leaves, a wrapped dough block is placed there, covered with another layer of leaves on top. Then all this is quickly covered with earth so that a slide is obtained. The dough baked in this way is a plump yellow cake that tastes good. By soaking it in water and mixing until a uniform consistency, you can get a kind of pudding. “If someone during his life plants ten breadfruit trees, then he can consider that he has done more to feed himself, his family and his offspring than an inhabitant of the temperate zone, working his field all his life in the sweat of his brow. .." - wrote the English navigator James Cook in his diary.
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