Flea & Tick Exterminator Services

These tiny insects can cause big problems once they get into your South Florida home. They bite people and pets, feeding off the blood of mammals (and birds), with these bites often feeling sore and itchy afterwards. Some people develop hives or rashes near the bite location and scratching the spot can lead to an infection. To top it off, ticks and fleas can carry dangerous diseases that can be transmitted to people and animals. 

If you try to crush fleas, their armored bodies will likely protect them from harm, allowing them to continue to thrive in your home. For professional flea removal services, please contact us online or call 954-326-8287. Ticks are tough critters, as well, so also contact us for your tick control needs.

Identifying Fleas

These thin, shiny, reddish-brown nuisances are about an eighth of an inch with large back legs when considering their overall size. Although they are wingless, their powerful legs allow them to jump—both upward and outward—by more than a foot in a single leap

Identifying Ticks

Plenty of troublesome tick species exist, with the Florida Department of Health listing these for our state: the blacklegged tick (small and reddish); lone star tick (reddish brown with females having a white dot); American dog tick (dark brown with white/gray mottling); Gulf Coast tick (red with ornate white markings); bont tick (brought in from the Caribbean); and the argasid tick (a soft-bodied pest).

Preventing Fleas

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers the following tips to prevent flea infestations in your home:

• Put limits on the time your pet is outdoors and limit contact with wild/stray animals.
• Regularly bathe and brush your pets and check for fleas.
• Ask your veterinarian which flea control products make sense for your pets. 
• Wash bedding often (for people and pets), as well as throw rugs. Also sweep and vacuum regularly. This can help to prevent a couple of fleas from turning into large numbers.

Preventing Ticks

The CDC recommends the use of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-registered insect repellents to prevent people in your family from getting bitten by ticks; ask your veterinarian how to protect your pets. After family members come in from outdoors, especially where ticks might live, check for ticks, “especially under the arms, in and around the ears, inside the belly button, behind the knees, between the legs, around the waist, and on the hairline and scalp,” and also take a shower. 

If you spot a tick in your skin, use fine-tipped tweezers to remove it, ASAP, grabbing the tick as closely to your skin as possible. Steadily pull upward without twisting or jerking. Keep the pressure even to avoid causing tick mouth-parts to remain in the skin. If that does happen, use clean tweezers to remove them. If that isn’t possible, leave them alone. Clean the bite area thoroughly with soap and water, rubbing alcohol, or iodine, and also wash your hands. 

Also consider tick exterminator services to help prevent a disease-carrying pest from biting you or a family member. Some people don’t have pain, itching, or redness around a tick bite, so a lack of symptoms doesn’t mean there isn’t a bigger problem.

Problems with Ticks and Fleas

Because ticks and fleas rely upon blood to survive, they attach themselves to cats and dogs outdoors. Then, when the pet goes inside, the unwanted pests ride in, too. Once inside, they can infest many other places in your Southern Florida home—and, unfortunately, fleas can live more than 100 days without nourishment. Once a female flea drinks blood, she can lay eggs within two days, laying as many as 2,000 eggs over her lifespan. 

As a couple of fleas turn into an infestation, you may see them hopping about in your home, on carpeting, furniture, and curtains. Plus, you may see clusters of red dots on your skin, particularly around your feet, ankles, and lower legs.

As for ticks, they can live for well over a year without nourishment. Ticks are hardy critters and, as a few of them turn into an infestation, you’ll likely see them in the skin of family members more and more often. 

Your pets may be biting, licking, and scratching their fur to an excessive degree, and you may see tiny insects on them or brown or black debris (which are flea feces). Or you may see ticks in your pets’ skin, including in their ears. As time goes on, the pet may lose fur and have scabs. If they suffer from blood loss, their gums will likely be pale.

If a cat or dog becomes infested with fleas, they may also have tapeworms; that’s because fleas can serve as hosts for some kinds of these parasites. So, the presence of tapeworms in pet feces is another sign of a flea infestation. If you see any of these signs, we invite you to contact us for flea and tick control services.

Diseases Spread by Fleas

Fleas can spread diseases to pets, but also to humans. Four of them include:

• Murine Typhus: Although rats usually get the blame for transmitting this disease, cats can catch it from infected fleas and people can also become infected through flea bites. This disease is transmitted most often in hot, humid climates. It can be treated with antibiotics but it’s important to seek treatment as soon as you suspect an illness.
• M. haemofelis is an infection of the red blood cells. Cats can get this through the bite of an infected flea and people with weakened immune systems can also be vulnerable.
• Tapeworms: We’d already mentioned this with pets but, in certain circumstances, children who accidentally swallow an infected flea can also get them.
• Cat scratch fever: Once a flea infected by Bartonella henselae bites a cat, the cat in turn can bite or scratch a person, passing on the disease. A cat can also pass this disease along by licking near a person’s wound.

Diseases Spread by Ticks

As the CDC notes, ticks spread numerous diseases, with the blacklegged tick transmitting Lyme disease. Other diseases spread by the species of ticks found in Florida include the following: anaplasmosis; babesiosis; borrelia mayonii; borrelia miyamotoi; ehrlichiosis; heartland virus; powassan disease; rickettsia parkeri rickettsiosis; Rocky Mountain spotted fever; STARI; and  

Tularemia. This is only a partial list but it readily highlights the importance of tick control services.

Tick and Flea Inspections

Our experienced technicians will thoroughly inspect your home for both adult ticks and fleas and those in these harder to detect stages: eggs, larvae, and pupae. Immature-stage fleas can hide in a pet’s bedding; in your carpeting; in, under, or behind furniture; in floor grooves; and more. If they are in your pet’s fur as it walks around the home, they can fall off at any time, further spreading their unwanted presence in your home.

After we inspect your home and identify the extent of the infestation and the species of the ticks and fleas, our team will then recommend the appropriate flea pest control treatment/tick extermination treatments. We’ll share our processes, the tick and flea exterminator costs, and ways to help prevent future infestations. With your approval, we’ll then professionally apply the treatments in the most efficient and effective ways so that your Southern Florida home can be tick and flea-free again.

Flea and Tick Yard Treatment

We go beyond tackling the bloodsucking pests that make it into your South Florida home, also focusing on the infestations in your yard. By reducing that population through professional flea and tick yard treatments, it makes it much less likely that these pests will attach themselves to people and pets and come indoors.

Flea and Tick Exterminator Service Areas

Gregory Pest Control was founded as a family owned and operated business in 1985 and remains that way today. We are fully committed to providing top quality services at a reasonable price in the communities of Coral Springs, Parkland, Weston, Pembroke Pines, Davie, Plantation, Boca Raton, Coconut Creek, and Southwest Ranches. If you live in Southern Florida and don’t see your community specifically listed, contact us, anyhow. We love to expand our horizons!

Our company was founded on the philosophy that customers value:

• Personal relationships
• Quality services 
• Professional results

In response, we provide the safest, most effective treatments possible to protect your home and family—in the same way that we’d protect our own homes and families through our Shield of Defense processes.

We offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee, standing proudly behind our work.

Contact Gregory Pest Control

If you live in one of our Southern Florida service areas and are looking for a “tick or flea exterminator near me” or “tick or flea pest control near me,” then just contact us online or call 954-326-8287 for fast, safe, effective, affordable flea and tick control services.