General Information about Ixodida.

 

          Ticks are in the chelicerata group (Arthropoda, Chelicerata) and relatively well known to the people of Brazil. People who have had (or still have) contact with life in the rural areas, regions with rainforest and cerrado regions, for example, have probably had contact with "mucuins" or "micuins" (both names are valid) . The mucuins are nothing more than the larvae of tick nymphs that have recently hatched from eggs that females deposited in the environment and are looking for vertebrate hosts in order to perform hematophagy (suck blood).

 

         All ticks are hematophagous (with the exception of some species that can feed on hemolymph) throughout their biological development. This fact, among others, differentiates them from the more than 30,000 species of mites and occur in practically all ecosystems on our planet.

 

          The fact that they are hematophagous makes ticks an important group due to the lesions that they cause in the skin of their hosts and as biological vectors of several pathogens. Although some species have specific lifetime hosts (monoxenous), many species are trixenous, that is, they can parasitise three or more species of completely different vertebrates , including man, during their life cycle and thus heighten their vector capacity. For some researchers, they are in second place to mosquitoes when it comes to the transmission of disease to humans and are in 1st place in the transmission of diseases of wild and domestic animals with great zoonotic potential. They are capable of transmitting viruses, bacteria and protists (Goodman, et al., 2005).

 

          All ticks are within the Order Acari, Suborder Ixodida (Krents, 2009) which has only three families: Nuttalliellidae, Argasidae and Ixodidae.

 

          The Nuttalliellidae family is a monogenic and monospecific family represented only by the species Nuttalliella namaqua. This species, first found by Bedford (1931) in the region of the Namaqualand Desert that is located between Namibia and South Africa and is restricted to Africa. It was recently collected in the same region and the immature and adult stages of males and females of the species were described (Latif et al., 2012).

 

          The Argasidaeis the second most numerous family of ticks. It is composed of 200 species distributed in several genera and found in several continents. Of these, 87 are found in the Neotropical Region. In Brazil, 21 species are known to be found in a wide variety of vertebrates (Barros-Battesti et al., 2013)

 

The Ixodidae family is the most numerous with 720 species known in the world. It is composed of 14 genera (Bowman & Nuttall, 2008), of which only 5 are found in the Neotropical Region: Amblyomma, Ixodes, Dermacentor, Rhipicephalus and Haemaphysalis.