two families of ticks of importance to domestic animals is in the article Mites of livestock. Typical ticks of domestic animals Amblyomma and Rhipicephalus ixodid ticks Amblyomma species are widespread on domestic animals throughout tropical and subtropical regions. Typical Amblyomma species are: Amblyomma americanum, the lone star tick of the Southern and Eastern USA; Am. cajennense, the Cayenne tick of South America and Southern USA; Amblyomma variegatum, the bont tick of Africa and the Caribbean (see Gallery below for photograph of female and male). A typical Rhipicephalus species is Rhipicephalus sanguineus, the tropical dog tick, specialized to feed only on dogs. It is distributed globally throughout the warm countries, wherever humans with their dogs live. Typical Rhipicephalus species that feed on cattle in Africa are R. appendiculatus, the brown ear-tick, and R. evertsi, the red-legged tick. Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus (or now simply Rhipicephalus microplus) is the most important tick of cattle in many tropical and subtropical countries to which it spread from Southeast Asia on transported cattle. Boophilid ticks, a subgenus within Rhipicephalus These ticks, commonly known as cattle ticks or blue ticks, have a highly characteristic morphology and one-host lifecycle. They have high specificity for cattle as hosts and their morphological characteristics used for identification are less distinct than those of three-host rhipicephalids such as R. appendiculatus. They are economically important to the cattle-rearing industry by causing direct parasitic losses and by transmission of microbes. In addition to Rhipicephalus microplus, species of most importance to domestic animals are R. annulatus, which is widespread in tropical and subtropical countries, and R. decoloratus which occurs in Africa. One-host lifecycle of R. microplus These ticks are adapted to the advantages of specialising to feed on cattle and with all the feeding stages occurring on one individual host in a rapid sequence. They also can survive by feeding on deer or some wild bovid hosts. Infestation starts when larvae on vegetation attach to a new host. When a larva feeds, it molts at the site where it feeds and emerges as a nymph. The nymph feeds at the same site or close by and molts where it feeds. It emerges from molt as either an adult female or male. The female's single large blood meal is converted into a batch of 2000 eggs. The males take several small meals of blood to support their repeated attempts at mating. The molts are rapid and