Rhipicephalus pseudolongus Santos Dias, 1953

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 : 126-127

62. Rhipicephalus pseudolongus Santos Dias, 1953 .

Afrotropical: 1) Cameroon, 2) Gabon (Santos Dias 1953 a, Pourrut et al. 2011).

Rhipicephalus pseudolongus is another controversial species, treated as provisionally valid in Walker et al. (2000), Guglielmone et al. (2009, 2014) and Guglielmone & Nava (2014), whose morphological separation from Rhipicephalus cliffordi , Rhipicephalus compositus , Rhipicephalus longus and Rhipicephalus senegalensis is extremely difficult. However, Walker et al. (2000) regarded Rhipicephalus cliffordi as a synonym of Rhipicephalus pseudolongus , and these authors included within the geographic distribution of Rhipicephalus pseudolongus the localities where Rhipicephalus cliffordi had been found, although they considered the presence of Rhipicephalus pseudolongus (= Rhipicephalus cliffordi ) in Angola and Togo to be confirmed. Elbl & Anastos (1966c) treated Rhipicephalus pseudolongus as a synonym of Rhipicephalus compositus , while Rhipicephalus pseudolongus of Santos Dias (1953a, named Rhipicephalus capensis pseudolongus ) was regarded by Camicas et al. (1988) as a synonym of Rhipicephalus longus , and Rhipicephalus pseudolongus in Clifford & Anastos (1962) was regarded as a synonym of Rhipicephalus cliffordi .

Clearly, this situation only increases the likelihood of confusion between the species of Rhipicephalus named here. Therefore, we have restricted the distribution of Rhipicephalus pseudolongus to its country of origin, Cameroon, and, provisionally, Gabon because Pourrut et al. (2011) clearly separated records of Rhipicephalus cliffordi from records of Rhipicephalus pseudolongus in that country.