Termite (Isoptera) sampling from soil: Handsorting or Kempson extraction?

Abstract

Complete assessments of termite assemblages in tropical rain forests are notoriously troublesome. We show that an automated method for the extraction of soil fauna from the soil, the so-called Kempson extractor, can be successfully applied to reduce sample processing time to about half the time (56%) needed for handsorting of similar samples, with no detectable trade-off in the variability of recorded individual numbers and in the frequency of samples with termites.