Vertebrates used for medicinal purposes by members of the Nyishi and Galo tribes in Arunachal Pradesh (North-East India)

Scientific research is revealing an ever increasing number of links between biodiversity and human health, not only in terms of food resources or food security, but also with regard to materials to treat and cure diseases. Since ancient time plants and animals, or parts of them, have been used therapeutically and even today animal and plant-based medicines continue to play an essential role in world health care [1]. Although plant and plant-derived materials have received considerably more attention from scientists and are more commonly used in traditional medical systems than animal-derived products, the latter also constitute an important element in the materialia medica. In fact, the use of animals for medicinal purposes is part of a body of traditional knowledge, which is becoming more and more relevant to discussions on mammalian relationships and phylogeny [2], conservation biology, biological prospecting, and patenting [3-6]. It has been reported that more than half of the world's modern drugs are of biological sources [7,8] and that of the 252 chemicals that have been selected by the WHO as essential to human health, 8.7% come from animal sources [7].It is fair to say that animals have been playing a significant role in healing processes, folk rituals, and religious practices of peoples from all five continents [6,9-12]. In traditional Chinese Medicine more than 1500 animal species have been recorded to be of some medicinal use [13,14]. A list of 60 different species of insects used to treat a wide range of disabilities and illnesses in Japan has been published [15] and 24 animal species were identified, whose by-products were used therapeutically by the Tamang people of Nepal [16]. In Pakistan, 31 animal-derived substances were said to constitute 9% of the total of the medicinal substances in the inventory of traditional healers [17]. Alves [18] conducted a study to review traditional treatments of a variety of ailments in North-East Brazil and recorded 250