Western drywood termite, Incisitermes minor, is distributed southwestern USA and northern Mexico. Invasions had been reported to Canada, China, Hawaii and Japan. Incisitermes minor may be introduced through wooden structures. In California and Arizona, it caused economic damage of about $250 million. In September 2023, it was discovered in a house in Changwon-city, Korea and a joint investigation was conducted by APQA and other government agencies. The 16S rRNA sequence was used in the molecular epidemiological investigation to trace the origin of the invasion. Five individuals found in Changwon and 18 foreign sequences collected by NCBI were compared. A total of 462bp of base sequences were compared, and the genetic distance was observed to range from a minimum of 0.000 to a maximum of 0.1791. They were most genetically similar to the California individual in the United States.

Drywood termite (Cryptotermes domesticus), native to South East Asia, is distributed in India, China, Taiwan, Australia and so on. In China, it is considered an economically important pest causing damage to wood. It lives in dry wood environments such as furniture, buildings, and structural timber. It is difficult to find drywood termite within a structure but it can be detected by the presence of alate flight and small egg-like pellets of excreta. It was found in a house in Seoul, Korea in July 2023 and was investigated joint by APQA, National Institute of Ecology, National Institute Biological Resources, National Institute of Forest Science, Cultural Heritage Administration and Gyeongsang National University. The COII barcode region was analized with PCR method and compared with the sequences of all C. domesticus registered in NCBI 557bp of base sequence. Genetic difference ranged from a minimum of 0.0072 to a maximum of 0.0557. Among these, the individual with the minimum genetic distance was from Guangdong Province, China.