Zoothamnium alternans Claparède & Lachmann, 1859

Chatterjee, Tapas & Dovgal, Igor, 2020, A checklist of ciliate epibionts (Ciliophora) found on bryozoans, Zootaxa 4896 (4), pp. 547-559 : 554-555

Zoothamnium alternans Claparède & Lachmann, 1859

Report as epibiont on bryozoans: This species was reported as epibiont on marine bryozoan Crisia eburnean (Linnaeus, 1758) in Kiel Bay , the North Sea ( Precht 1935). In addition, this species was also reported on the basal part of mature bryozoan Bugula sp. , obtained from Woods Hole harbor ( Summers 1938).

Report as epibiont on other hosts: It is cosmopolitan species reported from Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean ( Kahl 1935; Summers 1938; Ji et al. 2006; Ma & Overstreet 2006; Munir & Sun 2018). It was reported on crab Callinectes sapidus Rathbun, 1896 from Gulf of Mexico ( Ma & Overstreet 2006). It was also recorded from Woods Hole harbor attached with hydroids Pennaria sp. and Tubularia sp. ( Summers 1938).

Remarks: The species was found as planktonic in the North Sea. It is Kahl’s (1935) opinion, that these colonies were broken away from substrates. It was also found as plankton at 200 m depth in the the Bay of Bengal ( Munir & Sun 2018).