Ixodes uriae White 1852

254. Ixodes uriae White, 1852. Circumpolar: Ixodes uriae represents a special zoogeographic case because most populations are confined to several remote islands in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, near the Arctic and Antarctic zones, respectively, and are also found on remote islands in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans close to the Antarctic, as well as on the Antarctic Peninsula itself. Additionally, islands near continental mainlands in the northernmost and southernmost portions of the world, as well as seashores in the northernmost portion of the Northern Hemisphere have been found infested with Ixodes uriae. This peculiar range is related to the breeding sites of the sea birds that are hosts of this tick.

The geographic distribution of Ixodes uriae is peculiar and unrelated to the zoogeographic divisions followed in this study. Heath et al. (2011) also noted that several records of Ixodes uriae in New Zealand are from sea birds examined outside their breeding localities, a situation that surely applies to some collections of this tick from other countries, implicitly distorting the actual range of Ixodes uriae.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Ixodes uriae has been found in: 1) Argentina, 2) Australia, 3) Chile, 4) New Zealand and 5) South Africa; in the Northern Hemisphere it has been collected in: 1) Canada, 2) Denmark, 3) Finland, 4) France, 5) Germany, 6) Great Britain, 7) Greenland, 8) Iceland, 9) Ireland, 10) Japan (except the Ryukyu Islands), 11) Norway, 12) Russia, 13) South Korea, 14) Sweden and 15) USA (Filippova 1977, Keirans & Clifford 1978, Martyn 1988, Jaenson et al. 1994, Kolonin 2009, Heath et al. 2011, Petney et al. 2012, Muñoz-Leal & González-Acuña 2015, Kim et al. 2017, Horak et al. 2018, Guglielmone et al. 2021, Sormunen et al. 2022).

Several records of Ixodes uriae have been published under the names Ceratixodes uriae and Ixodes putus, which are the most common of the several synonyms of Ixodes uriae listed in Guglielmone & Nava (2014).

Ixodes uriae has been treated historically as a name that may include more than one species (Guglielmone et al. 2020).