title: The influence of interspecific competition and host preference on the phylogeography of two African ixodid tick species.
abstract: A comparative phylogeographic study on two economically important African tick species, Amblyomma hebraeum and Hyalomma rufipes was performed to test the influence of host specificity and host movement on dispersion. Pairwise AMOVA analyses of 277 mtDNA COI sequences supported significant population differentiation among the majority of sampling sites. The geographic mitochondrial structure was not supported by nuclear ITS-2 sequencing, probably attributed to a recent divergence. The three-host generalist, A. hebraeum, showed less mtDNA geographic structure, and a lower level of genetic diversity, while the more host-specific H. rufipes displayed higher levels of population differentiation and two distinct mtDNA assemblages (one predominantly confined to South Africa/Namibia and the other to Mozambique and East Africa). A zone of overlap is present in southern Mozambique. A mechanistic climate model suggests that climate alone cannot be responsible for the disruption in female gene flow. Our findings furthermore suggest that female gene dispersal of ticks is more dependent on the presence of juvenile hosts in the environment than on the ability of adult hosts to disperse across the landscape. Documented interspecific competition between the juvenile stages of H. rufipes and H. truncatum is implicated as a contributing factor towards disrupting gene flow between the two southern African H. rufipes genetic assemblages.
authors.affiliation: Evolutionary Genomics Group, Department of Botany and Zoology, Stellenbosch University, Matieland, South Africa.
authors.forename: Nídia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Cangi
authors.forename: Ivan G
authors.initials: IG
authors.lastname: Horak
authors.forename: Dmitry A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Apanaskevich
authors.forename: Sonja
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Matthee
authors.forename: Luís C B G
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: das Neves
authors.forename: Agustín
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Estrada-Peña
authors.forename: Conrad A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Matthee
mesh_terms: D056810:Acaricides / Q000494:pharmacology; D000818:Animals; D002980:Climate; D004351:Drug Resistance / Q000235:genetics; D014644:Genetic Variation; D006239:Haplotypes; D058507:Host Specificity; D026863:Ixodidae / Q000187:drug effects / Q000235:genetics / Q000502:physiology*; D058974:Phylogeography
chemical_list: D056810:Acaricides