a FORMERLY winged reproductive, because now the 4 nice, delicately veined, wings are shed now. An unlucky inidividual: either male or female, it has no chance to find a partner and start a new society among the seaweeds where it happened to land.
After all, the sharply cut, quadrate wing stubs remaining could indeed be mistaken for the shortened elytrae of a rove-beetle.
Isoptera are indeed the nearest living relatives of Cockroaches. That they, together with Mantids, form suborders inside the Dictyoptera, or else full orders in a superorder Blattopteroids is not so important. It's only a matter of rank, i.e. of convention.

You know a ton about these guys, that's really cool!
Will Chatfield-Taylor

Looks like in this taxonomic tree that Mantid, Roaches and Termites have been lumped. I'd think that this is the result of new systemmatics reasearch at the molecular level, as the physical traits of the three sub-orders are not very similar. So do we use this one, or the taxonomic grouping of Bugguide.net?
Will Chatfield-Taylor

Can you please enlighten me on this "new?" classification of termites? Thank you.

hehe... I may have mispoken... I've sinc learned that Dictyoptera is an older system rather than the newer one, my book is outdated