Biodiversity Data Journal 7: €47857 CO) doi: 10.3897/BDJ.7.e47857 open access Single Taxon Treatment The northernmost record of a blood-sucking ectoparasite, Lipoptena fortisetosa Maa (Diptera: Hippoboscidae), in Estonia Olavi Kurina*, Heli Kirik+, Heino Ounap§, Erki Ounap?*! F Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Kreutzwaldi st 5D, Tartu, Estonia § Estonian Environment Agency , R6dmu tee 6, Tartu, Estonia | Department of Zoology, Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, University of Tartu, Vanemuise 46, Tartu, Estonia Corresponding author: Olavi Kurina (olavi.kurina@emu.ee) Academic editor: Torsten Dikow Received: 31 Oct 2019 | Accepted: 07 Dec 2019 | Published: 13 Dec 2019 Citation: Kurina O, Kirik H, Ounap H, Ounap E (2019) The northernmost record of a blood-sucking ectoparasite, Lipoptena fortisetosa Maa (Diptera: Hippoboscidae), in Estonia. Biodiversity Data Journal 7: e47857. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.7.e47857 Abstract Background Deer keds are obligatory haematophagous parasites of large homeothermic animals, particularly cervids. Two of the five known species occurring in Europe—Lipoptena cervi (Linnaeus) and L. fortisetosa Maa—are known to have a relatively wide distribution. Lipoptena fortisetosa is considered to have been introduced into Europe with sika deer from the Eastern Palaearctic and is continuously expanding its range. Little is known about the medical importance of deer keds, but they can cause hair loss in cervids and are suspected to be vectors of several diseases. New information Details of the distribution of Lipoptena fortisetosa in Europe, including its northernmost record, are provided. This species has been shown to have a viable population in Southern © Kurina O et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. 2 Kurina O et al Estonia. Furthermore, the differences from allied L. cervi are discussed, based on morphological and molecular characters. Keywords Diptera, DNA barcode, Hippoboscidae, deer keds, distribution, range expansion Introduction Deer keds (Insecta: Diptera: Hippoboscidae: Lipoptena spp.) parasitise wild as well as domestic animals, being most often associated with Cervidae and have been known to occasionally attack humans. Their medical impact is only superficially known, but as shown quite recently, deer keds are potential vectors of several diseases, for example, those caused by Bartonella spp., Coxiella spp. and Rickettsia spp. (Hornok et al. 2011, Lee et al. 2016, Szewczyk et al. 2017, Regier et al. 2018). Therefore, precise species identification, distribution details and bionomics are of utmost importance from the animal and human health perspective and imperative for vector control. There are 30 Lipoptena species known worldwide (Dick 2006), including five species recorded from Europe (Petersen 2013). Three of the five species have a restricted distribution in Southern Europe, including the Mediterranean islands, while L. cervi (Linnaeus, 1758) and L. fortisetosa Maa, 1965 have a more northern range (Petersen 2013). Having been described from Honshu Island in Japan (Maa 1965), L. fortisetosa has been subsequently widely reported from the Eastern Palaeractic (e.g. Dozanov 2003). In Europe, the species was first recorded from Czech Republic where it was initially described as a new species—L. parvula Theodore, 1967, but was later synonymised with L. fortisetosa by Grunin (1970). Thereafter, a number of records have been published from Central and Eastern European countries (see Fig. 1 for details). However, no records of L. fortisetosa westwards from Switzerland, northwards from the Moscow region in Russia or southwards from Tuscany in Italy were hitherto known. During recent years, several specimens of deer keds, collected from Estonia and morphologically distinct from the common L. cervi, have come into the authors’ possession. Detailed investigation of these specimens, following the keys provided by Grunin (1970) and Buttiker (1994) and the differential diagnosis provided by Andreani et al. (2019), revealed them to be L. fortisetosa. This is the first time this species has been recorded from Estonia. Our study aims to investigate the morphological and molecular differences between L. cervi and L. fortisetosa, summarise the known distributions and provide the northernmost record of the latter.