Abstract
The Sunda region of Southeastern Asia is rich in termite fauna, but termites from this region have been poorly described. In this study, we described eight species from two diverse genera from this region, and from the family Termitidae. We describe Bulbitermes 4 spp. and Nasutitermes 4 spp. from new field collections. Where possible we examine original holotype specimens, and describe the essential morphological characters for soldier and worker castes. We devise two new bifurcating keys to guide the field identification of each species. In addition, we develop a nucleotide sequence profile for the COI gene. From this molecular character matrix, we use Neighbour-Joining analysis to test the monophyly of each morphospecies and genus. We find that the morphological and molecular characters are highly concordant, whereby all taxa appear to represent distinct molecular clades. For termites, there is therefore agreement between the morphological taxonomic characters used to sort species from a bifurcating key and the molecular taxonomic characters used to sort species on a bifurcating tree. This joint analysis suggests that DNA barcoding holds considerable promise for termite taxonomy, especially for diverse clades like Bulbitermes and Nasutitermes for which a global morphological key would be intractable.
Highlights
As the largest subfamily among the higher termites (Family Termitidae), the Nasutitermitinae include more than 650 species from over 80 genera (Kambhampati and Eggleton 2000)
In this report we present the taxonomic notes for representative Bulbitermes and Nasutitermes species collected from Sumatra and Malay Peninsula within Southeast Asia
We evaluate how well nucleotide sequence information from the c oxidase I gene (COI) barcode region of the mitochondrial genome can resolve species relationships through simple negihbour-joining analysis
Summary
As the largest subfamily among the higher termites (Family Termitidae), the Nasutitermitinae include more than 650 species from over 80 genera (Kambhampati and Eggleton 2000). Genera from this subfamily are present in all biogeographical regions except the palearctic (Pearce and Waite 1994), and include at least 16 genera that are endemic to Southeast Asia (Tho 1992). Relative to other biogeographic regions, the taxonomy of Nasutitermitinae in Southeast Asia remains poorly understood (Chhotani 1987, 1997; Gathorne-Hardy 2001). This may stem in part from the historically poor taxon sampling from within this region (Eggleton 1999), but may stem from a lack of diagnostic characters that clearly distinguish some of the genera
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