RESULTS
Tick prevalence within the two study sites
Nine hundred and fifty three (953) ticks’ samples were collected from
the designated localities in Raymond Mhlaba Local Municipality of
Eastern Cape Province and analyzed for the prevalence of tick-borne
rickettsial pathogens in the sampling sites.
Morphological identification method used to delineate the collected
ticks showed that they belonged to three genera, which wereRhipicephalus , Amblyomma and Hyalomma with six
different species. Amongst them were A. hebraeum 39.14%
(n= 373 adult), R. appendiculatus 16.4% (n=156(34) adult),R. microplus 13.96% (n=133 adult), R. simus. 11.75%
(n=112 adult), Rhipicephalus eversti eversti 9.02% (n =86
adult), and H. truncatum 9.76% (n =93 adult) in decreasing order
of their prevalence. A. hebraeum was the most prevalent species
in both study sites with cattle serving as the common host.
Furthermore, BLAST analysis of the edited tick 12S mitochondrial rDNA
sequences showed that they all had more than 97% sequence homology with
curated ticks’ sequences in GenBank. Molecular identification of the
representatives of different ticks delineated by morphological methods
confirmed the accuracy of the morphologic classification as shown in
Figure 1. The proportions of the different ticks collected in the two
study sites are presented in Tables 2 while Table 3 is the list of
reference sequences obtained from GenBank that were used in the
phylogenetic analysis of the ticks’ sequences generated in this study.
Table 2: Proportion and
distribution of collected tick species in Debe Location and Fort
Beaufort, geographical coordinates: 32.836°S 27.154°E, coordinates 32°
47’ 0” S, 26° 38’ 0” E.