A sprinkling of cheese mites. And meat specially tenderized by two mating house flies. But a bug in rich dinner is only the start of the evening's entertainment. There are cannibals in the cushions. Preliterate dust mites look for a more varied diet than the Smith. They are after each other. Scientists are testing whether these cannibal mites can be used to control numbers of other mites in grain stores. But these ones are just one part of the food chain. Like the Smith themselves, head lice, body lice, mosquitoes, fleas, they can't stop scratching. The dog is a walking flea circus. Fleas can stay as eggs for up to a year. All they need is a cue, vibrations or heat, which tells them there's a blood source nearby. As soon as they hatch, they are starving. Fleas can jump up to 20 centimeters, about 150 times their own height as they search for food, hundreds of times an hour for days on end. In the past, being covered with fleas couldn't be avoided. It's hard to believe when we look them this close in the eye, but love-struck 17th century Europeans wrote seductive poems about their lover's fleas. One Frenchman even kept one of his girlfriends' fleas as a pet in a gold cage around his neck so it could feed on his own blood. 

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