Author: DELAIT Josseline
The sandflies are insects of the order Diptera.
There are several genres, two of which being of interest in human pathology: Lutzomyia for the New World, Phlebotomus for the Old World.
These sandflies are very small blood-sucking insects (2-3mm), whose females can be vectors of pathogens of human diseases. An example of a disease is Leishmaniasis, a cutaneous, mucocutaneous or visceral disease, caused by flagellated protozoa called Leishmania.
On the island of Madagascar, the description of sandflies began with the description of a first species in 1969: Phlebotomus madagascariensis, now renamed Grassomyia madagascariensis.
It is thanks to the laborious but fruitful work carried out by researchers such as N.Léger, J.Depaquit or V.Robert, that other species could have been described.
It should be noted that for the moment, no case of Leishmaniasis has been recorded in Madagascar. Also, the potential vector role of sandflies of the island of Madagascar remains to this day still unknown.
Before this work, which was the subject of his thesis, young French pharmacy doctor Antoine Blavier, that he presented and publicly supported on September 25, 2018, 13 species of Madagascar sandflies were officially described and divided into three genres: Phlebotomus, Grassomyia and Sergentomyia.
Specifically 723 specimens from the Ankarana region, in the north of the country, were trapped and analyzed for this research.
Thanks to a morphological identification coupled to a molecular one, 3 to 4 new species have been described (the subject is still under discussion): Sergentomyia volfi n. sp., Sergentomyia kaltenbachi n. sp. and Sergentomyia ozbeli n. sp.
Se. volfi n. sp., Se. kaltenbachi n. sp. cannot belong to the "already" existing subgenera, two new subgenera have been created: Ranavalonomyia subg. nov., and Riouxomyia subg. nov. Thus we obtain the following designations: Sergentomyia (Ranavalonomyia) volfi and Sergentomyia (Riouxomyia) kaltenbachi.
An interesting fact to add in this article is that it has been estimated in 2018 that there are currently 5.5 million different insects on Earth for only about 900 000 known.
As we know, the discovery of new species allows an increase in the human knowledge as well as potential medical advances, and the parasitology world is definitely open to any researcher: advanced or freshly graduated, as it was the case with this young French doctor, who won, thanks to his thesis, the prize of the best french pharmacy thesis in parasitology 2018. Congratulations again for his contribution to the world of parasitology!
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