Fig 1.
Distribution and abundance of tick species across various study sites of the Maasai Mara National Reserve.
This map is Republished with data under CC BY licenses from the following sources: https://www.wri.org/resources/data-sets/kenya-gis-data from the World Institute Resources, 2007 [18]; https://africaopendata.org/dataset/kenya-counties-shapefile from openAfrica, 2015 [19]; and https://gadm.org/data.html from GADM, 2018 [20].
Fig 2.
Comparison of selected Amblyomma species from this study: Amblyomma gemma and color variants of Amblyomma gemma ticks are depicted on panels A and B while an unclassified Amblyomma tick is shown in panel C.
Similarities between Amblyomma gemma and color variants of Amblyomma gemma are labeled in white and differences in red colors respectively.
Fig 3.
Maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree of tick ITS-2 gene sequences (739–1276 bp).
GenBank accession numbers, species identifications, and isolates, and tick life stages (in brackets) are indicated for each sequence. Sequences from this study are indicated in bold letters. Bootstrap values at the major nodes are of percentage agreement among 1000 replicates. The branch length scale represents substitutions per site.
Table 1.
Abundance and diversity of tick species collected in this study.
Table 2.
Tick-borne pathogens identified.
Fig 4.
Maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree of Rickettsia and Coxiella 16S rRNA gene sequences (248–301 bp).
GenBank accession numbers, species identifications, and isolates, with tick or vertebrate host species and country of origin in brackets, are indicated for each sequence. Sequences from this study are bolded. Bootstrap values at the major nodes are of percentage agreement among 1000 replicates. The branch length scale represents substitutions per site. The gaps indicated in the branches to the Coxiella and Rickettsia clades represent 0.10 substitutions per site.
Table 3.
Summary of vertebrate sources of blood-meals in individual adult ticks detected by PCR and sequencing in questing ticks collected in this study.