Buthus Leach, 1815

Sousa, Pedro, Arnedo, Miquel A. & Harris, D. James, 2017, Updated catalogue and taxonomic notes on the Old-World scorpion genus Buthus Leach, 1815 (Scorpiones, Buthidae), ZooKeys 686, pp. 15-84 : 24

Genus Buthus Leach, 1815

Buthus : Leach 1815: 391; Latreille 1817: 310; Gervais 1844b: 203; Peters 1861 (part): 513; Thorell 1876a (part): 82; Thorell 1876b: 7; Simon 1879: 95-96; Karsch 1886 (part): 77; Pocock 1890 (part): 122; Karsch 1891: 18; Kraepelin 1891 (part): 35-42; Pocock 1893 (part): 312; Kraepelin 1895 (part): 79-80; Laurie 1896 b: 131; Lönnberg 1897 b (part): 194; Kraepelin 1899 (part): 9; Pocock 1900a (part): 13; Simon 1910: 67-68; Birula 1917a (part): 20-24, 164; Birula 1917b (part): 55; Pavlovsky 1924 (part): 77; Kastner 1941 (part): 230; Vachon 1948a: 206-208; Vachon 1949a: 155-162; Vachon 1952a: 155, 241-246, fig. 579; Vachon 1963 b: 164, fig. 10; Bücherl 1964: 57; Stahnke 1972: 132, fig. 20; Vachon 1974: 906; Levy and Amitai 1980: 14-15; Francke 1985: 6, 15; Sissom 1990: 101; Nenilin and Fet 1992: 17; Kovařík 1998: 106; Fet and Lowe 2000: 91; Lourenço 2016b: 3-4.

Type species

(by original designation). Scorpio occitanus Amoreux, 1789 [= Buthus occitanus (Amoreux, 1789)].

Etymology.

Leach did not provide an explanation for his selection of the genus name. A search on the original usage of the word may shed some light on the intended meaning. Buthus is the Latin form of the Greek name βοῦθος ( Bouthos ), an unusual name of a winning athlete of the ancient Pythian Games, mentioned by Hesychius and Aristotle ( Müller 1848, Christesen 2007). The name was more familiar in antiquity when used in the adage "Βοῦθος περιφοιτᾷ”, translated to the Latin as " Buthus obambulat ", which translates into " Buthus who wanders", which apparently was applied to stupid and simple people ( Müller 1848, Christesen 2007). In Hofmann et al. (1698) the entry for Buthus reads "athleta nobilis, qui bovem integrum unô die devorare solebat; unde natum proverbium in edaces, Buthus obambulat " which roughly translates to "a noble athlete, who used to devour a great ox in a day, and who gave rise to the proverb, Buthus obambulat ". Noël (1824) entry for Buthus also refers to an athlete that devoured an ox in a single day, and that this voracity was the origin of the proverb " Buthus obambulat ", which according to the author refers to gluttony. Interestingly Noël also states that Buthus , in combination with "βῦς, θúιεν (thuein)", also refers to sacrifice. This opinion shares roots with the meaning of two other words with similar etymology, būthysĭa (used by Nero) that translates to "sacrifice of an ox" and būthytēs (used by Pliny the Elder), that translates to a "sacrificed ox", according to the Gaffiot Latin-French dictionary (Various 2016). Recently Dupré (2016) reached a similar conclusion, although he states that Buthus originates from the composition of the Greek word "Gr. bous, ox; - thouéin [Greek suffix?], killer". Potentially therefore, Buthus refers to a stupid or voracious animal, an ox killer or to a sacrifice of an ox, from the latter two we can interpret it as a powerful and dangerous animal. In our opinion the later makes more sense and agrees well with what was known at the time about the potent venom of Buthus scorpions. As such, it is our opinion that Buthus is a singular masculine Latin word (of Greek origin), which Leach intended as homage to an ancient hero (a trend at that time), and that refers to an animal so venomous that it could kill an ox.

Distribution.

AFRICA: Algeria, Cameroon, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco (including Western Sahara), Niger, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia.?Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Burkina Faso,?Gambia, Ghana,?Djibouti. ASIA: Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Yemen.?Iraq,?Lebanon,?Saudi Arabia,?Turkey. EUROPE: France, Italy (Sicily), Spain, Portugal.?Malta,?Greece (Corfu, Thessaly). All currently valid records of Buthus species per country are presented in Table 2. Figure 10 offers an additional zoom to the most diverse region of Buthus species diversity, the Maghreb.

Remarks.

There are several old records of Buthus , marked with a question mark above, which have never been found again (independently of the material in which they were based being lost or not). As such, many have not been checked since the genus was reduced in scope by Vachon (1949), or those localities remain doubtful because no Buthus has been collected there since. This is of special significance in countries like Greece and Turkey that have been in recent years reasonably well prospected. Type specimens for several Buthus species described early on were not designated or have since become lost, but this does not necessarily represent a taxonomic problem. For example B. occitanus has no type specimen ( Fet and Lowe 2000), but its type locality is well established and no other Buthus species occurs nearby. In this case the designation of a neotype is not justified under the ICZN (article 75.2). However, this is not the case for other species that have neither type specimens nor localities, and that we will further discuss below.