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.