Cínthya Viana Souza Rocha‡, Matheus Santos dos Anjos‡, Deivson Araújo Brandão‡, Caio Ceza da Silva Nunes§, Mariane Amorim Rocha‡, Patricia Belini Nishiyama‡, Ricardo Evangelista Fraga‡, Patricia Maria Mitsuka|, Márcio Borba da Silva¶Corresponding author: Márcio Borba da Silva ( biolmarcioborba@gmail.com ) Academic editor: Adalgisa Fernanda Cabral © Cínthya Viana Souza Rocha, Matheus Santos dos Anjos, Deivson Araújo Brandão, Caio Ceza da Silva Nunes, Mariane Amorim Rocha, Patricia Belini Nishiyama, Ricardo Evangelista Fraga, Patricia Maria Mitsuka, Márcio Borba da Silva. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
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Testate amoebae are single-celled protists whose protoplasm is contained within a carapace composed of gelatinous to imbricated chitinous plates having variable chemical compositions. We inventoried the testate amoebae community present in the plankton and periphyton of the Pantanal dos Marimbus swamp in Bahia state, Brazil. Sixty-five samples of plankton and periphyton were analyzed during May and September/2014 and April/2015. We identified 65 taxa of testate amoebae distributed in eight families, 15 genera, 45 species, and 16 varieties. The most representative families were Arcellidae, Centropyxidae, and Difflugiidae, corresponding to 24.6%, 19.7% and 14.8% of the taxa respectively. The periphyton had greater richness (59 taxa) than the plankton (39 taxa). Of the taxa found, 15 represent new records for Bahia and 14 for northeastern Brazil. The Marimbus Pantanal swamp showed an expressive richness of testate amoebae, and our data increases the number of species of these organisms known to Bahia and northeastern Brazil, where work with those organisms is still scarce.