“…The functional approach allows for a better understanding of the functioning of several environments, using distinct groups of organisms, such as bacteria (Fuhrman, 2009), phytoplankton (Cardoso et al, 2017), plants (Cohen et al, 2014) and zooplankton (Setubal and Riccardi, 2020;, while data with ciliates are scarce (Weisse, 2017). Studies with a functional approach involving ciliates have been carried out in different ecosystems, such as the soil (Coûteaux and Darbyshire, 1998), coastal waters (Xu et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2016;Zhong et al, 2017;Xu et al, 2018d;Guo and Xu, 2019;Xu and Soininen, 2019;Zhong et al, 2019a,b;Gui et al, 2020;Guo et al, 2020), and wetlands (Xu et al, 2018c,d;Liu et al, 2019;Xu et al, 2020), while it is rare to find one in a limnic environment.…”