“…Molecular methods accurately capture the differences among species (Bezeng et al, 2017) and complement morphological data in species identification. Molecular sequence data involving mtDNA COI gene has stronger patterns of genetic variability than those of nuclear regions (Li et al, 2014a), and the COI barcode region has been a verified effective and informative tool employed in animal identification (Hebert et al, 2010;Pawlas-Opiela et al, 2010;Li et al, 2014b) including ticks (Lv et al, 2014;Zhang and Zhang, 2014;Csordas et al, 2016;Ghosh et al, 2020;Davari et al, 2021). Integrative morphological and molecular identification of ticks gives a clear and more reliable result compared to single identification method (Ghosh et al, 2020).…”