Haemaphysalis spinulosa Neumann, 1906

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 : 99

153. Haemaphysalis spinulosa Neumann, 1906 .

Afrotropical: 1) Uganda ( Hoogstraal 1964 b, Tomlinson et al. 2018).

Haemaphysalis spinulosa is a difficult species to identify. Hoogstraal (1964b) redescribed the female and designated a lectotype, and he later supported the description of Haemaphysalis sipinulosa by Hussein & Mustafa (1983, see page 411). However, Horak et al. (2018) noted that Hoogstraal (1964) and Hussein & Mustafa (1983) depicted different species; consequently, Horak et al. (2018) did not treat Haemaphysalis spinulosa as a South African species and named specimens from that country as Haemaphysalis spinulosa- like. The taxonomic status of Haemaphysalis spinulosa was further complicated by the study of Tomlinson et al. (2018), who morphologically analyzed thousands of specimens identified as Haemaphysalis spinulosa that had been deposited in the United States National Tick Collection, concluding that no bona fide Haemaphysalis spinulosa were in that collection, and specimens under this name had been misidentified or represented new species overlooked in the past. Thereafter, Apanaskevich & Tomlinson (2019, 2020) and Tomlinson & Apanaskevich (2019) described eight new species of Haemaphysalis from specimens previously classified as Haemaphysalis spinulosa .

Considering this situation, the range of Haemaphysalis spinulosa here includes only Uganda, where the two type specimens were collected. Therefore, records of Haemaphysalis spinulosa from Tanzania in Heylen et al. (2021) and from Pakistan (west) in Ullah et al. (2022), which ignore the study of Apanaskevich & Tomlinson (2018), are not included within the range of this tick.