New rodents hosts of sucking lice, fleas (Insecta: Anoplura, Siphonaptera) and hard ticks (Acari: Ixodida) from Iran

Rodents, as the most common mammal species around the world, are indicated as one of the main health problems to humans, especially in the populated areas. Since most of the rodent species are considered as suitable reservoirs for many zoonotic diseases and serious pathogens, their ectoparasitic fauna has become of special interest (Nava et al. 2003). With respect to the fact that Mashhad is one of the most densely populated cities in Iran, this investigation was carried out in various locations of Mashhad, Khorasan Razavi Province, Iran including public sites, parks, farms, industrial constructions, excavation areas (e.g. sandy, rocky) from April 2013 to December 2014. Rodents were trapped using custom-made mesh live-traps and snap traps with various bait materials and identification of them was made following the methods described by Corbet (1978). Ectoparasites collections and preparation was done based on procedures described by Hamidi et al. (2015) and Moravvej et al. (2015). Ectoparasites were identified using valid taxonomic keys (e.g. for Mallophaga (Korytkowski 2002), Siphonaptera (Acosta and Morrone 2003) and ticks (Baker 1999). All specimens were deposited in the collection of the Department of Plant Protection, Faculty of Agriculture, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran.