Haemaphysalis shimoga Trapido & Hoogstraal, 1964

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 : 98-99

146. Haemaphysalis shimoga Trapido & Hoogstraal, 1964 .

Oriental: 1) Cambodia, 2) China (south), 3) India, 4) Myanmar, 5) Thailand, 6) Vietnam ( Phan Trong 1977, Tanskul & Inlao 1989, Geevarghese & Mishra 2011, Li et al. 2018, Petney et al. 2019).

Several records of Haemaphysalis shimoga have been published under the name Haemaphysalis cornigera shimoga .

Kolonin (2009) treated Haemaphysalis shimoga as a synonym of Haemaphysalis taiwana , but both species are considered valid in Guglielmone et al. (2014, 2020) and here. See also Haemaphysalis anomaloceraea for its proposed synonymy with Haemaphysalis shimoga .

The geographic distribution of Haemaphysalis shimoga is uncertain. Tanskul & Inlao (1989) stated that Haemaphysalis shimoga can be difficult to identify morphologically, adding that specimens from Thailand listed as Haemaphysalis cornigera in Tanskul et al. (1983) are in fact Haemaphysalis shimoga . The presence of Haemaphysalis shimoga in Vietnam is partly based on Phan Trong (1977), who named this tick Haemaphysalis cornigera vietnama , a synonym of Haemaphysalis shimoga in Camicas et al. (1998), who followed Kolonin (1995b), who stated that the tick described by Phan Trong (1977) closely resembles Haemaphysalis shimoga , but later changed his opinion concerning this species (see above).

Hoogstraal & El Kammah (1972) and Geevarghese & Mishra (2011) recognized Haemaphysalis shimoga as being present only in India. Records of Haemaphysalis shimoga from Cambodia and Myanmar are based on Tanskul & Inlao (1989), who used ticks from these countries but also from India, Thailand and Vietnam in their redescription of this species. Li et al. (2018) found Haemaphysalis shimoga in southern China but left open the possibility that Chinese specimens represent a species other than Haemaphysalis shimoga from India and Thailand due to molecular differences between the tick populations. However, Zhang, G. et al. (2019), Zhang Y.K. et al. (2019) and Zhao et al. (2021) did not recognize the presence of Haemaphysalis shimoga in China, which we tentatively include within the range of this tick. Additional studies are needed to better define the range of Haemaphysalis shimoga .