Two new species and new records of chiggers (Acari: Leeuwenhoekiidae, <br />Trombiculidae) from birds in Vietnam

Abstract

A total of 12 chigger species (Acariformes: Trombiculidae) occurred on 7 bird species in Vietnam. Two new species, namely Neoschoengastia vietnamensis sp. nov. and Hypogastia stekolnikovi sp. nov. are described, figured and compared with similar species placed in relevant genera using differential diagnoses of related species.

On the taxonomy of chigger mites (Acariformes: Trombiculidae) parasitizing birds in Thailand and Malaysia, with the description of a new species

“…Moreover, they found no species of Toritrombicula, whereas we recorded three, and this genus was rather frequent in our collections (Tables 9, 10). In Thailand, we collected two species of Neoschoengastia from passerines whereas three other species from the same genus were reported by Kaluz et al (2016). In contrast, we did not find this genus on Passeriformes in the Malaysian localities.…”

“…The chigger species composition on the Passeriformes in the study areas significantly differed from that of the seven passerine bird species examined by Kaluz et al (2016) in North Vietnam. Among the 12 chigger species found by these authors, only one (O. audyi) was also recorded in our study.…”

“…In general, extensive investigations focused on bird chiggers are rare, as compared with chiggers from mammals (Trnka et al 2022). Among the recent works on Southeast Asian chiggers, a paper based on the collections from Vietnam should be consulted (Kaluz et al 2016), in which three species of Neoschoengastia Ewing, 1929 (including two new to science), Odontacarus audyi (Radford, 1946), Helenicula scanloni (Domrow & Nadchatram, 1964), Neotrombicula elegans Schluger, 1966, and six species of Leptotrombidium Nagayo et al, 1916 were recorded on seven bird species. Noteworthy is that all of them, except for H. scanloni, were unknown previously in Vietnam, even though this country is the third most studied for chiggers in Southeast Asia, after Malaysia and Thailand (Stekolnikov 2021a).…”

The diversity and distribution of chigger mites associated with rodents in the South African savanna

“…francolin and guineafowl) are able to adapt to agricultural areas that have heterogeneous habitats (Goijman et al ., 2015; van Niekerk, 2017). Ground-living birds are also common hosts for chiggers (Kitaoka et al ., 1972; Kaluz et al ., 2016) and can therefore facilitate the occurrence of chigger species within the agricultural habitat type. Further, the agricultural habitat may also provide food resources to predatory nymph and adult trombiculid mites through the presence of Collembola (Janion, 2013; Leinaas et al ., 2015) and mosquito species (Kweka et al ., 2012) that are associated with agricultural habitats.…”

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“…However, morphological descriptions of previously described species were not updated; these authors simply reproduced those, including drawings from the original publications. Later, Antonovskaia et al (2017) and Kalúz et al (2016) reported several new species and records of chiggers from Vietnam. Currently, the number of chigger species recorded in Vietnam counts 105; thus, it is the third result in Southeast Asia, after Malaysia (202 species) and Thailand (156 species) (Stekolnikov 2021).…”