Parasitic strategies of arthropods of medical and veterinary importance

Recently, Di Giovanni et al. (2021) reviewed three parasitic strategies employed by terrestrial arthropods of medical and veterinary importance: (1) trophic transmission, (2) direct transmission, and (3) micropredators, subdivided into short- and long-term. The use of direct as both a transmission strategy and a life cycle descriptor is confusing, and we prefer the widely accepted term monoxeny for organisms with direct life cycles. Authors unnecessarily proposed "longterm micropredators", which in our view, are typical monoxenous parasites like lice that spend most of their life cycle on the host. We emphasize that micropredators are free living organisms making more than one visit to one or more host(s) during their life cycle, with all or most ontological phases occurring off-host: an iteromonoxenous or iteroxenous life cycle, if you will. We further suggest that vector-borne transmission of arthropods is an additional strategy, such as that employed by Dermatobia hominis which captures flying insects and glues eggs onto their abdomens.