7. Rhipicephalus aurantiacus Neumann, 1906 .

Afrotropical: 1) Cameroon, 2) Central African Republic, 3) Congo, 4) Democratic Republic of the Congo, 5) Gabon, 6) Guinea, 7) Ivory Coast, 8) Liberia (Morel & Mouchet 1965, Morel 2003, Pourrut et al. 2011).

Camicas et al. (1998) considered Rhipicephalus aurantiacus a valid species, but Walker et al. (2000) treated this tick as a probable synonym of Rhipicephalus ziemanni, and Horak et al. (2002) and Kolonin (2009) did not include Rhipicephalus aurantiacus in their lists of the ticks of the world. Guglielmone et al. (2009) found that the synonymy proposed by Walker et al. (2000) is unproven. Walker et al. (2000, page 483) listed (page 479) Rhipicephalus aurantiacus as a synonym of Rhipicephalus ziemanni, but in their “Identification notes” (page 483) they stated “Further study, including examination of the types of R. aurantiacus, may later prove this decision to have been wrong.” The validity of Rhipicephalus aurantiacus is accepted in Guglielmone et al. (2009, 2014, 2015, 2020), Guglielmone & Nava (2014) and here, while stressing the need for type comparisons to definitively resolve this problem.

Uilenberg et al. (2013) suspected that Rhipicephalus aurantiacus is present in the Central African Republic, and that country is provisionally included within this tick’s range.