Hirstionyssus Fonseca, 1948

Vinarski, Maxim V. & Korallo-Vinarskaya, Natalia P., 2020, An annotated catalogue of the gamasid mites associated with small mammals in Asiatic Russia. The family Hirstionyssidae (Acari: Mesostigmata: Gamasina), Zootaxa 4838 (1), pp. 102-118 : 103-104

Genus Hirstionyssus Fonseca, 1948

Hirstionyssus Fonseca, 1948: 266 .

Dermanyssus Dugès, 1834: 18 (partim).

Liponyssus Kolenati, 1859: 172 (partim).

Echinonyssus Hirst, 1925: 51 sensu Tenorio & Radovsky, 1979 .

Sciurinyssus Koyumdzhieva, 1978: 49.

Type species: Dermanyssus arcuatus C.L. Koch, 1839 = Liponyssus arcuatus (C.L. Koch) sensu Oudemans, 1913 (see remarks below)

General morphological diagnosis: see Evans & Till (1966: 277), Mašán & Fend’a (2010: 71).

Notes: Some authors, following Tenorio & Radovsky (1979) and Tenorio (1984), accept Hirstionyssus as a junior synonym of Echinonyssus Hirst, 1925 . On the other hand, Mašán & Fend’a (2010) consider Echinonyssus as a monotypic genus restricted to the type species Echinonyssus nasutus Hirst, 1925 . This point of view corresponds to that of Russian acarologists ( Bregetova 1956; Zemskaya 1973; Goncharova et al. 1991) and is followed here.

The genus has been recorded from all continents and comprises more than 115 species ( Tenorio 1984). The ex- USSR acarofauna includes approximately 30 species of Hirstionyssus ( Bregetova 1977) , nearly 20 of which have been recorded from the Asiatic Russia territory.

The identity of the type species of the genus Hirstionyssus , Dermanyssus arcuatus C.L. Koch, 1839 sensu Oudemans, 1913 , has been debated in the literature. Most authors agree that it is a doubtful taxon, and its taxonomic treatment was different in the works of different acarologists. Though Evans & Till (1966) and Tenorio (1984) viewed D. arcuatus as identical with Hirstionyssus talpae Zemskaya, 1955 , it was re-named by Zuevsky (1970) as Hirstionyssus apodemi . A very wide spectrum of hosts of Dermanyssus arcuatus C.L. Koch sensu Oudemans, 1913 , ranging from bats to carnivores ( Oudemans, 1913a, b), indicates that a mixture of several species might have been united under this taxonomic name.