Pharmacological properties of blister beetles (Coleoptera: Meloidae) promoted their integration into the cultural heritage of native rural Spain as inferred by vernacular names diversity, traditions, and mitochondrial DNA

Abstract

Current knowledge of blister beetles of the family Meloidae in rural Spain was likely developed as a consequence of their pharmacological properties; we hypothesize this knowledge was inherited from ancient pre-Christian Iberian native cultures as part of their traditional therapeutic traditions. It is possible then, that current vernacular names and traditional songs are the only remnants of an ancient knowledge of pharmacological uses of meloid beetles, verbally transmitted from the ancestral cultures to modern day rural Spain. Our work suggests that this legacy, part of the European Cultural Heritage, is disappearing fast, in parallel to the loss of traditional agricultural techniques.

Cantharidin is conserved across phylogeographic lineages and present in both morphs of Iberian Berberomeloe blister beetles (Coleoptera, Meloidae)

“…Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to amplify 657 base pairs (bp) of the mitochondrial Cytochrome Oxidase I gene (cox1), using the primers LCO1490 (Folmer et al, 1994) and COI-H (Machordom et al, 2003). PCR reactions were performed as explained in Percino-Daniel et al (2013). Sequencing was as indicated in Martínez-Solano et al (2006).…”

“…The cox1 sequences were aligned in Mesquite v.3.04 (Maddison & Maddison, 2015) to correct the final alignments. The data set consisted of 67 specimens from B. majalis and 15 additional specimens obtained by Percino-Daniel et al (2013) (GenBank accession numbers: KC853086-KC853103). For the phylogenetic analyses, we included the other known species of the genus, Berberomeloe insignis (Charpentier, 1818), as a related outgroup.…”

“…We explored the substitution model space with the option lset nst=mixed rates=invgamma. To estimate the posterior probabilities of all the parameters, we ran four Markov Chains Monte Carlo (MCMC) for 100 × 10 6 generations sampling every 10 000 generations, in two independent runs (for further details see Percino-Daniel et al, 2013). To generate the final phylogenetic hypothesis, we discarded 25% of the obtained trees as burn-in, and generated an annotated 50% Majority Rule consensus tree in MrBayes.…”

Therapeutic and prophylactic uses of invertebrates in contemporary Spanish ethnoveterinary medicine

“…In the south-western quadrant of Spain, to heal infected wounds (particularly on the legs) the recommendation was to cut off the head of a blister beetle, Berberomeloe majalis , and spread the haemolymph on the wound [63, 64]. By contrast, in the western part of the province of Granada and at Berganciano (Salamanca) a medicinal preparation was made by macerating many specimens of this beetle in olive oil [52, 61, 65].…”

“…To interrupt breastfeeding in calves at Benalup de Sidonia (Cádiz) the shepherds would cover the udders of cows with the haemolymph of Berberomeloe majalis [63]. …”