Kwinana Rockingham Mandurah Branch, 19 May 2025
KRMB member Daniel Heald was the speaker for the May general meeting. He delivered a talk on Insects and Medicine, as outlined in the following summary provided by Daniel.
Insects in Medicine
The use of insects as medical treatments goes back to before written history, but that is not in itself very surprising – health problems are universal, as is the need to find anything that works. One early work on the subject was the Benaco Gangmu. This encyclopedia of Chinese medicine, compiled in 1587, lists 73 different insects. However, its relationship to reality is debatable – it also claims that Langur monkeys are 3 meters tall and can pull their lips over their heads.
Dubious claims persist about some of the insects used in traditional Chinese medicine – the Black Mountain Ant Polyrhachis vicina is still promoted as a cure-all, and the caterpillar-killing fungus Cordyceps chinensis is collected in huge quantities from the Tibetan plateau. As a result, the species is rapidly becoming endangered, and the remaining forests are being stripped for firewood by collectors. Predictably, for something demanding a high price, it’s supposedly an aphrodisiac.
More interesting are those species that are widely agreed to be useful for specific conditions. In Nagaland, on the eastern border of India, many different indigenous groups agree that Blister Beetles in the genus Mylabris are an effective treatment for warts. Over an even wider area, Weaver Ants in the genus Oecophylla are used to severe cough, cold and flu in Myanmar, Africa, and Australia. Given how Weaver Ants taste, that might be for the same reason hot lemon drinks are a popular remedy for the same conditions.
In European medicine, the Doctrine of Signatures led to the use of stick insects to treat weight loss and dung beetles for constipation. Bedbugs have been applied in many appalling ways for at least 2000 years (with some of those treatments still in use in the US as recently as 2002). ‘Spanish Fly’ (an extract of some Soldier Beetles) was a supposed aphrodisiac despite being extremely poisonous if ingested. Likewise, the use of bee venom to treat arthritis is pointless and sometimes deadly. Recent claims that metal spoons ‘kill the enzymes in honey’ are five different kinds of medical nonsense.
Two groups of insects, however, have a long and widespread legacy of success. Large ants are used as living sutures to hold wounds closed, and maggots are used to clear necrotic tissue from wounds to prevent gangrene and facilitate healing.
Not only that, but Tsetse flies have also inspired steerable bone drills, mosquitos vibrating microneedles, insect micro peptides as ideas for new antibiotics, and the microscopic surface texture of butterfly and dragonfly wings to shed bacteria or outright kill them.
Lastly, it has recently been discovered that humans are not the only animals to conduct surgery on the wounded. Camponotus floridanus ants carefully assess their wounded sisters and amputate wounded legs, taking 40 minutes to complete each operation.
Daniel supported his talk with his presentation showing images of the species and procedures mentioned in the talk. With some time remaining before the scheduled close of the meeting, Daniel then presented a talk on ‘Other Wood Borers – Ship Timber and Telephone Pole Beetles’.
Colin Prickett