Haemaphysalis aciculifer Warburton, 1913

Guglielmone, Alberto A., Nava, Santiago & Robbins, Richard G., 2023, Geographic distribution of the hard ticks (Acari: Ixodida: Ixodidae) of the world by countries and territories, Zootaxa 5251 (1), pp. 1-274 : 77

2. Haemaphysalis aciculifer Warburton, 1913 .

Afrotropical: 1) Botswana, 2) Cameroon, 3) Democratic Republic of the Congo, 4) Eswatini, 5) Ethiopia, 6) Kenya, 7) South Africa, 8) South Sudan, 9) Tanzania, 10) Uganda, 11) Zambia, 12) Zimbabwe ( Hoogstraal & El Kammah 1972, Colbo 1973, Norval 1985c, Matthysse & Colbo 1987, Kolonin 2009, Horak et al. 2018).

Hoogstraal & El Kammah (1972) redescribed Haemaphysalis aciculifer and noted that it can be confused with Haemaphysalis rugosa . Morel (2003), whose research was based on information largely collected and referenced before Hoogstraal & El Kammah (1972), and Theiler (1962) included most of the countries named above but also Benin, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone (not in Theiler (1962)) within the range of Haemaphysalis aciculifer , yet most of this information was ignored in Hoogstraal & El Kammah (1972). Perhaps the range of this tick is broader than currently recognized, but in the cases of Ghana and Senegal, Haemaphysalis aciculifer has been confused with Haemaphysalis rugosa ( Hoogstraal & El Kammah 1972, Sylla et al. 2018), and those countries named by Morel (2003) and Theiler (1962) but not included in Hoogstraal & El Kammah (1972) are here provisionally excluded from the range of Haemaphysalis aciculifer . Ntiamoa-Baidu et al. (2004) listed the presence of Haemaphysalis aciculifer but not Haemaphysalis rugosa in Ghana, but this is treated here as an error, considering that the type locality for the latter name is in Ghana. Uilenberg et al. (2013) stated that no bona fide specimens of Haemaphysalis aciculifer have been collected in the Central African Republic. Nyabogo et al. (2021) included Burundi within the range of this tick, based on Kaiser et al. (1988), but the latter authors did not mention its presence there. Farooqi et al. (2017) and Ramzan et al. (2020b) listed Haemaphysalis aciculifer as occurring in Pakistan, but its presence in that country is not supported here.