Species identification and haplotypes
Sixty-seven sympatric colonies of Reticulitermes termites were
identified using a series of morphological and mitochondrial COII gene
analyses (Fig. 2). There were 38 colonies belonging to R.
flaviceps and 29 colonies belonging to R. chinensis . Both
species were distributed accross Chengdu, Nanjing and Wuhan. For the
mitochondrial markers, 661 bp of COII was resolved in 67 individuals.
In
all samples, 31 unique haplotypes were identified based on the 92
variable sites (14 singleton variable sites and 78 parsimony-informative
sites) derived from the 67 aligned individuals based on the
mitochondrial COII gene sequences. Among the different sample plots,
nine haplotypes were
found
in Nanjing, 12 haplotypes in Wuhan and 18 haplotypes in Chengdu. The
phylogenetic tree constructed via the ML method showed two major clades
within the collected sampled species (Fig.
2).
The first clade comprised samples showing haplotypes similar to R.
flaviceps, and the second clade comprised samples showing haplotypes
similar to R. chinensis.