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.