Biodiversity Data Journal :
Single Taxon Treatment
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Corresponding author: Olavi Kurina (olavi.kurina@emu.ee)
Academic editor: Torsten Dikow
Received: 31 Oct 2019 | Accepted: 07 Dec 2019 | Published: 13 Dec 2019
© 2019 Olavi Kurina, Heli Kirik, Heino Õunap, Erki Õunap
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Kurina O, Kirik H, Õunap H, Õunap E (2019) The northernmost record of a blood-sucking ectoparasite, Lipoptena fortisetosa Maa (Diptera: Hippoboscidae), in Estonia. Biodiversity Data Journal 7: e47857. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.7.e47857
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Deer keds are obligatory haematophagous parasites of large homeothermic animals, particularly cervids. Two of the five known species occurring in Europe—Lipoptena cervi (Linnaeus) and L. fortisetosa Maa—are known to have a relatively wide distribution. Lipoptena fortisetosa is considered to have been introduced into Europe with sika deer from the Eastern Palaearctic and is continuously expanding its range. Little is known about the medical importance of deer keds, but they can cause hair loss in cervids and are suspected to be vectors of several diseases.
Details of the distribution of Lipoptena fortisetosa in Europe, including its northernmost record, are provided. This species has been shown to have a viable population in Southern Estonia. Furthermore, the differences from allied L. cervi are discussed, based on morphological and molecular characters.
Diptera, DNA barcode, Hippoboscidae, deer keds, distribution, range expansion
Deer keds (Insecta: Diptera: Hippoboscidae: Lipoptena spp.) parasitise wild as well as domestic animals, being most often associated with Cervidae and have been known to occasionally attack humans. Their medical impact is only superficially known, but as shown quite recently, deer keds are potential vectors of several diseases, for example, those caused by Bartonella spp., Coxiella spp. and Rickettsia spp. (
Distribution of Lipoptena fortisetosa in Europe, with year of the earliest known specimen for each particular country. Asterisk indicates a year of published reference without collected/observed specimen(s) data known. A dot on the map can represent several nearby records. The source references are: 1 – Germany (
During recent years, several specimens of deer keds, collected from Estonia and morphologically distinct from the common L. cervi, have come into the authors’ possession. Detailed investigation of these specimens, following the keys provided by
Altogether, 35 specimens collected from 21 localities in South-eastern Estonia from 2014 to 2019 have been studied. The majority of the specimens were collected while they were attacking humans. The insects were caught manually and submerged in ethyl alcohol or pinned. This material is deposited in the insect collection of the Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Estonian University of Life Sciences [former Institute of Zoology and Botany], Tartu, Estonia (IZBE), in the Zoological Museum University of Tartu, Estonia (TUZ) and in the private collection of Heino Õunap, Tartu, Estonia (PICHO). The habitus pictures have been stacked using the software LAS V.4.1.0. from several gradually focused images taken from pinned specimens by a Leica DFC 450 camera, attached to a stereomicroscope Leica 205C (for details, see
Genomic DNA was extracted from one crushed hind leg of each specimen using High Pure PCR Template Preparation Kit (Roche Diagnostics GmbH, Mannheim, Germany). The extraction was carried out following the manufacturer’s instructions, with the exception that the first incubation step was 55ºC for two hours rather than one hour.
A 643-bp section from the 5' terminus of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase gene subunit I (COI), roughly corresponding to the standard DNA barcoding fraction of the gene (
The DNA cycle sequencing was performed in a total volume of 10 μl using BigDye® Terminator v3.1 Cycle Sequencing Kit (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA). Cycling conditions were: 33 cycles of 20 s at 95°C, 20 s at 50°C (primers LCO1490 and HCO2198) or 47°C (primers MLepF1 and LepR1) and 60 s at 60°C. Both DNA strands were sequenced with 2 pmol of primers and sequences were resolved by 3730xl DNA Analyzer automated sequencer (Applied Biosystems) in Estonian Biocentre (Tartu, Estonia).
Consensus sequences were created using Geneious 7.1.9 (Biomatters Ltd, Auckland, New Zealand). Sequences were aligned using ClustalW (
In the Materials section of Taxon treatment below, only one specimen per collecting locality has been presented. For the full list of the studied specimens, including the comparative material of L. cervi, see Suppl. material
The imago of L. fortisetosa is considerably smaller than that of L. cervi (Fig.
The identities of the fragments of the COI gene obtained in this study were double-checked by BLAST search in GenBank. One hundred percent identity with sequences stored in the GenBank was recovered for several specimens of both L. fortisetosa and L. cervi, corroborating the correctness of our morphological identification.
To place our results in a wider context, original COI sequences of Lipoptena spp. were analysed, together with the COI data of their conspecifics available in the NCBI GenBank (accessed 03 October 2019). In total, our data matrix comprised 63 sequences of L. cervi (7 original, 56 downloaded) and 10 sequences of L. fortisetosa (7 original, 3 downloaded) (Suppl. material
In the Eastern Palaearctic, L. fortisetosa is described as a common parasite on sika deer (
The first record of L. fortisetosa in Europe dates back more than 60 years when the species was collected in Czech Republic (
All Estonian specimens of L. fortisetosa but two were collected from June to the beginning of August, while the comparative material of L. cervi was collected from mid-August to September (Suppl. material
The L. fortisetosa COI sequences available in the GenBank hinted that this species is genetically diverse and has geographically distinct lineages in Europe, as the uncorrected genetic distance between specimens collected from Lithuania (
The study was supported by institutional research funding (IUT21-1 and IUT20-33) of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research. We are grateful to collectors of the Lipoptena specimens for our study: T. Kesküla, K. Sammet, M. Kruus, L-M. Kurina, T. Tammaru, Ü. Jäe, K. Kübar, T. Kull, M. Kose, H. Pehlak, R. Viidalepp, J. Ruusmaa and M. Jüssi. T. Randveer (Tartu) is thanked for information on the sika deer distribution.