Taxonomic History

The first rhinonyssid nasal mite was described by Giebel (1871), which is now known as Ptilonyssus nitzschi.  Other European workers who contributed to the early literature include Berlese and Trouessart (1889), Trägärdh (1904), Hirst (1921a, b, 1923) and Vitzthum (1935).  The modern study of the group begins with the work of Strandtmann (1948-1962) and his colleagues, Furman (1957), and Hyland (1959-1970) in the United States, Castro (1948), Pereira and Castro (1949), and Amaral (1962-1974) in Brazil, Zumpt and Patterson (1951) and Zumpt and Till (1955) for Africa, and Bregetova (1964-1971) in Russia.  However, it has been Fain (1955-1969) that has made the largest contribution to the group, at least in terms of the number of described taxa.  When Strandtmann and Wharton (1958) published their world compilation of species they recognized 17 genera and a total of 109 named species, of which Fain had described 46 of the species and 2 of the genera.  This work is notable because it was the last time that a complete list including all the world taxa was published.  As of now, Fain and colleagues have described 184 species in 56 separate papers, mostly covering Africa, Brazil, Trinidad, and Europe.

More recently, the United States fauna has been surveyed by Pence (1972-1979), culminating in his review of the North American species (Pence, 1975).  Additionally, Spicer (1977-1987) has contributed to the North American and Neotropical fauna.  The Australian fauna has been surveyed by Domrow (1964-1979), resulting in his review of the fauna (Domrow, 1987), the South Pacific fauna has been examined by Wilson (1964-1968), and ongoing work in Russia published by Butenko (1968-2003) and colleagues (e.g., Stanyukovich and Butenko, 2003).  In addition, recent articles continue to be published in the scattered taxonomic literature of the family from throughout the world (e.g., Guevara et al., 1987; Kadosaka et al., 1987; Ubeda et al., 1989, 2000; Rodriguez et al., 1991, 1993; Leonovich and Stanyukovich, 2002).

After reviewing the published papers, the current number of described species numbers about 510 according to my records (while not exhaustive, I believe this is almost complete).  I estimate that this represents about half the number of morphological species yet to be described, since so few neotropical bird hosts have been examined.  However, this would be a dramatic underestimate if the preliminary molecular studies described below are representative, which suggest that every bird species could have its own mite species.  Then the total number of rhinonyssid mite species could easily number 5,000-10,000.

Generic Phylogeny

The higher-level arrangement of taxa has been contentious, with many workers having quite different views as to what constitutes a genus or subfamily or family in the group.  A total of 39 genera have been described for the family Rhinonyssidae.  However, most of these genera have been based on rather arbitrary characters, or characters that do not appear to be important at a higher taxonomic level.  As part of his review of Australian nasal mite fauna Domrow (1969) evaluated the generic classification of the group and determined that the following eight genera appear to be justified: Sternostoma, Ptilonyssus, Ruandanyssus, Rhinoecius, Larinyssus, Rallinyssus, Rhinonyssus, Tinaminyssus.  Most workers have agreed with his assessment since then (Amaral and Rebouças, 1974; Pence, 1975; Spicer, 1987).

Phylogenetic hypotheses for the family have been as disparate as the taxonomic arrangements.  In general, the group is believed to have evolved from free-living soil dwelling predators that became ectoparasitic on vertebrates, and eventually developed into the endoparasites they are today (Vitzthum, 1935; Domrow 1969).  Most workers consider the group to be geologically old, but other than that there is little agreement on relationships among higher taxa.  The extreme views are summarized first by Bregetova (1964, 1971) who believes the group consists of two separate families and 25 genera, while Domrow (1969) considers the group as just a subfamily with perhaps eight genera.  The proposed phylogenies for the family are presented, but it should be noted that none of these phylogenies are based on any rigorous phylogenetic analysis.