Hyalomma marginatum Koch, 1844a

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 : 107

18. Hyalomma marginatum Koch, 1844a .

Palearctic: 1) Albania, 2) Algeria, 3) Armenia, 4) Azerbaijan, 5) Bosnia and Herzegovina, 6) Bulgaria, 7) Croatia, 8) Cyprus, 9) Egypt, 10) France, 11) Georgia, 12) Greece, 13) Iran, 14) Iraq, 15) Israel, 16) Italy, 17) Jordan, 18) Kazakhstan, 19) Kosovo, 20) Kyrgyzstan, 21) Libya, 22) Malta, 23) Moldova, 24) Montenegro, 25) Morocco, 26) North Macedonia, 27) Palestine, 28) Portugal, 29) Romania, 30) Russia, 31) Serbia, 32) Spain, 33) Syria, 34) Tunisia, 35) Turkey, 36) Turkmenistan, 37) Ukraine ( Feider 1965, K ö hler et al. 1967, Hoogstraal 1979, Saliba et al. 1990, Morel 2003, Apanaskevich & Horak 2008 b, Keysary et al. 2011, Akimov & Nebogatkin 2011 b, Santos-Silva et al. 2011, Bursali et al. 2012, Sherifi et al. 2014, Hovhannisyan & Dilbaryan 2016, Estrada-Peña et al. 2017, Fedorova. 2017, Pflieger et al. 2017, Nader et al. 2018, Hosseini-Chegeni et al. 2019, Perfilyeva et al. 2020, Tsapko 2020).

Many records of Hyalomma marginatum were published under the names Hyalomma plumbeum or Hyalomma plumbeum plumbeum , and to a lesser extent as Hyalomma savignyi , names treated as incertae sedis in Guglielmone & Nava (2014).

Morphological diagnosis of adult Hyalomma marginatum can be difficult due to intraspecific variation, and even more so in the case of the immature stages. Therefore, several published records of Hyalomma marginatum and related species should be considered provisionally valid.

Apanaskevich et al. (2008b) and Estrada-Peña et al. (2017) explained that the northern limit of Hyalomma marginatum is uncertain, but records from central and northern Europe are considered to be a consequence of ticks being introduced with migrating birds, since no permanent populations of Hyalomma marginatum have been detected there, although this species may eventually establish itself in such territories ( Estrada-Peña et al. 2021). Jaenson et al. (1994) and Jameson et al. (2012), among others, presented evidence of this situation in northern Europe, as did Trilar et al. (2004) for central Europe. Grandi et al. (2020) described a worrisome scenario for Hyalomma marginatum in northern Europe because several adults of this species have been found on local domestic mammals and humans in Sweden, possibly a result of hotter than usual summers that allowed nymphs brought with migrating birds to develop into adults. Similar reports have come from Germany, the Netherlands and Czechia, as detailed in Rubel et al. (2021), Uiterwijk et al. (2021) and Lesiczka et al. (2022), respectively.

Chen et al. (2010), Zhang, G. et al. (2019) and Zhang, K.Y. et al. (2019) did not mention the presence of Hyalomma marginatum in China, but Zhao et al. (2021) listed this tick as found in that country, although without providing references more recent than 2018. China is therefore provisionally excluded from the range of Hyalomma marginatum . Livestock infestations with Hyalomma marginatum in countries such as Benin (Chiba China et al. 2016), Ethiopia ( Walker et al. 2003, Kebede & Fatene 2012), India ( Walker et al. 2003, Anish et al. 2020), Nigeria ( Mamman et al. 2021), Pakistan ( Ali et al. 2019, Kasi et al. 2020, and others), Somalia ( Pegram 1976), Sudan ( Walker et al. 2003, Elhaj et al. 2019) and Zambia ( Kajihara et al. 2021), among others, require further studies to determine whether the specimens collected were from established populations and to check the accuracy of species diagnoses. At the moment, none of these countries are included within the geographic distribution of this tick.