Free-living ciliates of river Tisa and its tributaries

The largest left-side tributaries of River Danube, being the largest ones anyway, are River Tisa (966 km) and River Prut (926 km). The former proceeds on the territory of Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia, while the latter in Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. Despite the great value of these water courses, literature devoted to the study of protozoans inhabiting them is poor. Some of these papers (Pujin, Stanojevic 1979; Josa 1981; Kovalchuk, Kovalchuk 1984) deal with the ciliates of River Tisa. Data on ciliates of River Prut have been published recently (Kovalchuk 1993). More comprehensive data on the species composition of free-living ciliates of occasional eco-groups (Kovalchuk 1997, 1997a) have not been published in any paper, instead they were presented at two international conferences held in 1997 in Transcarpathia