The appearance of the digestive tube in situ is shown to be valuable in the identification of worker termites, particularly those of detritus and soil feeding species. Genera, and sometimes species, can be identified by this character. These preliminary findings will be of assistance to termite ecologists interested in population studies, where problems of the identification of mixed samples containing workers from cores or other soil samples are a serious problem.
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Robert A. Johnson (1979) studied this question.