Rhipicephalus turanicus Pomerantzev, 1940

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 : 131

83. Rhipicephalus turanicus Pomerantzev, 1940

in Pomerantzev et al. (1940).

Palearctic: 1) Uzbekistan ( Filippova 2008).

Rhipicephalus turanicus is a controversial and taxonomically complex species because morphological and biological studies demonstrate that the diagnosis of this tick is uncertain, with different species having apparently been identified under the name Rhipicephalus turanicus , as discussed in Beati & Keirans (2001), Dantas-Torres et al. (2013) and Estrada-Peña et al. (2017), among others. Alleged Rhipicephalus turanicus have been reported from a wide range of countries, and Camicas et al. (1998) and Walker et al. (2000) listed this tick as an Afrotropical, Oriental and Palearctic species. However, Guglielmone & Nava (2014) and Guglielmone et al. (2014, 2015, 2020) regarded Afrotropical records, as in Pegram et al. (1987b) and Walker et al. (2000), as unsound because it is unclear whether the specimens involved in those studies were bona fide Rhipicephalus turanicus . The opinion of Guglielmone and co-workers was confirmed when African specimens of Rhipicephalus turanicus in Pegram et al. (1987b), also listed in Walker et al. (2000), were later described as a new Afrotropical species, Rhipicephalus afranicus , by Bakkes in Bakkes et al. (2020).

Bakkes et al. (2020) and Guglielmone et al. (2014, 2015, 2020) regarded Rhipicephalus turanicus as a Palearctic species, agreeing also that the morphological redescription of this tick by Filippova (1997) represents either bona fide Rhipicephalus turanicus , or the most probable description of this controversial species. However, Bakkes et al. (2020) regarded Rhipicephalus turanicus as a Middle Eastern and Asian species, while we believe that the only bona fide locality record for Rhipicephalus turanicus is Tanshkent, Uzbekistan, the type locality.

Bakkes et al. (2020) redescribed Rhipicephalus turanicus as a Palearctic species containing two lineages, one of them named as Rhipicephalus turanicus sensu lato, which appears to be identical to Rhipicephalus secundus , a name incertae sedis in Guglielmone & Nava (2014) but reinstated by Mumcuoglu et al. (2022). The other lineage, named Rhipicephalus turanicus sensu stricto was described from two specimens, a male and a female, collected from a dog at an unknown locality in Turkmenistan, Central Asia (which includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), and all figures related to the male and female of Rhipicephalus turanicus sensu stricto in Bakkes et al. (2020) are based on these two Turkmenistan specimens, indicating their importance in the morphological definition of this lineage. The type host of Rhipicephalus turanicus is Ovis aries and the type locality is Tashkent, Uzbekistan ( Filippova, 2008), located in the limited area of this country that possesses a Mediterranean climate (DSa in the K ö ppen-Geiger climate classification), while the climate in most of Uzbekistan and all of Turkmenistan is cold and arid or semiarid (BWk and BSk in the just-cited climate classification).

At this juncture, we feel that it is premature to further define this species without additional morphological and molecular analyses of specimens collected from Ovis aries in Tashkent. This is not to say that the definition of Rhipicephalus turanicus in Bakkes et al. (2020) is wrong, but the information provided by these authors should be confirmed by comparison with specimens collected from the type host at the type locality. Consequently, Rhipicephalus turanicus is regarded here as a tick that occurs in Uzbekistan, but its range will almost certainly be expanded when morphological and molecular data from the type locality and host are available to compare with the data provided by Bakkes et al. (2020).