Ixodes affinis, in Cooley and Kohls, 1945

Guglielmone, Alberto A., Petney, Trevor N. & Robbins, Richard G., 2020, Ixodidae (Acari: Ixodoidea): descriptions and redescriptions of all known species from 1758 to December 31, 2019, Zootaxa 4871 (1), pp. 1-322 : 6-7

4. Ixodes affinis Neumann, 1899.

A Nearctic and Neotropical species whose adults and immature stages have been found on Artiodactyla : Cervidae , Carnivora : Procyonidae , and Didelphimorphia : Didelphidae ; adults alone have been collected from Artiodactyla : Bovidae , Carnivora : Felidae , Canidae and Ursidae , Perissodactyla : Equidae , and rarely from Cathartiformes: Cathartidae ; immature stages have been recovered from Lagomorpha : Leporidae , Rodentia : Cricetidae , Muridae and Sciuridae , Soricomorpha : Soricidae , Squamata : Teiidae , and Passeriformes (several families) (Guglielmone et al. 2014, Esser et al. 2016 a, b, Heller et al. 2016, Rodríguez-Vivas et al. 2016, Nadolny & Gaff 2018, Scott et al. 2018, Saracho-Bottero et al. 2020). There are no bona fide records of Ixodes affinis causing human parasitism.

M: Cooley and Kohls (1945), but see note below

F: Neumann (1899)

N: Oliver et al. (1987)

L: Oliver et al. (1987)

Redescriptions

M: Keirans and Clifford (1978), Keirans and Litwak (1989), Guzmán-Cornejo and Robbins (2010), Bermúdez et al. (2018)

F: Cooley and Kohls (1945), Keirans and Clifford (1978), Keirans and Litwak (1989), Guzmán-Cornejo and Robbins (2010), Bermúdez et al. (2018)

N: Durden and Keirans (1996)

L: none

Note: Keirans and Clifford (1978) state that the description of the male of this species is in Fonseca (1935a) under the name Ixodes ricinus aragaoi , but this is in error because that description corresponds to Ixodes aragaoi , currently a synonym of Ixodes fuscipes , treated as a synonym of Ixodes affinis in Cooley and Kohls (1945) and Keirans and Clifford (1978), among others. Clifford et al. (1973) consider Ixodes affinis a Nearctic species, but this is erroneous since its description is based on material obtained in Costa Rica. Ixodes affinis is closely related to Ixodes fuscipes and Ixodes pararicinus , making it difficult to identify with certainty. Rodríguez-Vivas et al. (2016) in Mexico and Polsomboom et al. (2017) in Belize found Ixodes near affinis , suggesting that more than one species may be represented under this name. More recently, Saracho-Bottero et al. (2020) identified as Ixodes cf. I. affinis specimens from northeastern Argentina previously classified as Ixodes pararicinus . Those authors found three populations of Ixodes cf. I. affinis , one in Argentina, another in Colombia-Ecuador, and a third population in Belize-USA that differ at the molecular level from one another and probably from bona fide Ixodes affinis , but found no morphologically significant differences to separate the populations investigated. Most probably the name Ixodes affinis represents a species complex. See also Ixodes pararicinus .