Argas vespertilionis ( Latreille, 1802 )

Argas vespertilionis ( Latreille, 1802) View in CoL

Caris vespertilionis Latreille, 1802: 68 .

Argas vespertilionis View in CoL .— Estrada-Peña et al., 2017: 33.

Material: 2 larvae, ex female Mops midas , from Amhara, North Gondar Zone, Bermil, Alatish National Park 12°23'N, 35°44'E, 562 m asl, 9 April 2010, leg. Denis A. Vasenkov & Leonid A. Lavrenchenko (collection ID ZMMU S-189546) GoogleMaps .

Distribution: Palaearctic, Oriental and Afrotropical realms; recorded in Africa from Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, West Sahara ( Sándor et al., 2021), Ethiopia (this study, new record).

Host species: Many bat species in families Vespertilionidae (especially Pipistrellus spp. ), Rhinolophidae , Miniopteridae , Rhinopomatidae , Emballonuridae and Pteropodidae . Family Molossidae : Tadarida aegyptiaca , Tadarida teniotis , Mops midas (this study, new record).

Non-chiropteran host: human, Canis familiaris, Picus viridis ( Sándor et al. 2021) .

Medical significance: – associated pathogens – Issyk-Kul' virus, Sokuluk virus ( Lvov et al. 1973), Keterah virus ( Varma & Converse 1976), soft tick bunyavirus ( Oba et al. 2015), TBEV ( Orlova & Kononova 2018), Ehrlichia sp. Av (Lv et al. 2018), Ehrlichia sp. AvBat ( Socolovschi et al. 2012), Bartonella sp. la 23, Bartonella sp. lv76 ( Hornok et al. 2019), Rickettsia raoulti , Rickettsia rickettsia ( Zhao et al. 2020) , Rickettsia sp. AvBat (subspecies of the spotted fever group), Rickettsia lusitaniae , Rickettsia africae -like sp. ( Hornok et al. 2019), Rickettsia sp. AvBat (subspecies of the spotted fever group) ( Socolovschi et al. 2012), Coxiella burnetii ( Zhmaeva et al. 1966) , Ehrlichia canis group ( Ehrlichia sp. AvBat), Borrelia sp. CPB1 ( Socolovschi et al. 2012), Borrelia burgdorferi s.l. ( Hubbard et al. 1998), Borrelia afzelii ( Wilhelmsson 2018) , Babesia vesperuginis (Lv et al. 2018) , Babesia venatorum (Lv et al. 2018) .

Discussion

The bat species from which parasites were collected for this study belong to extremely widespread genera and are themselves relatively widespread within Africa. Rhinolophus landeri is one of the most widespread African Rhinolophus species ( Brown & Dunlop 1997). Myotis bocagei has a scattered but wide distribution range from Yemen to Angola and Liberia ( Patterson et al. 2019). Mops pumilus and M. midas inhabit most of sub-Saharan Africa and also Madagascar ( Bouchard 1998; Dunlop 1999). Miniopterus arenarius has a quite limited range, covering the southern Arabian Peninsula and northern East Africa (Wilson & Mittermeyer 2019), but it appears to be part of a complex of forms related to M. natalensis ( Naidoo et al. 2016) that is distributed across much of Africa. The parasites associated with these bat species, and the pathogens they carry, may circulate widely across the African continent. It is worth adding that both Mops species are known to inhabit human buildings ( Dunlop 1999; Jackson et al. 2023), increasing the medical relevance of studying their ectoparasites. Bats and their ectoparasites carry pathogens with the potential to infest humans in the Palaearctic Region ( Sándor et al. 2024) and in China ( Han et al. 2021), and we expect the same to be true in other areas.

The ranges of the collected gamasid ectoparasites within Africa almost coincide with the ranges of their host species, while the ixodid and argasid ticks are distributed much more widely. We have sampled only a small proportion of the bat species that occur in Ethiopia, but even this limited collection provided a substantial increase in the number of ticks and mites, and added some new host records. We anticipate that the number of ectoparasite species will increase quickly when a more extensive survey is conducted.

Acknowledgements

Financial support of this this study was provided by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation in the frames Agreement no. 075-15-2023-591. The work of SVK was carried out in line with State theme of scientific work of the ZMMU (No 121032300105-0).

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