| The morphology of Colpoda maupasi, isolated from soil samples of Mount Luojia, Wuhan City, and the community structure of soil ciliates of the Yulong Mountains, Yunnan Province, the upper Yangtze River, were studied in this paper.Wholly speaking, the Wuhan population of Colpoda maupasi is similar to other populations. However, there were more or less differences in some characteristics of different populations such as the size and pattern of extrusomes, and the number of somatic ciliary rows. We agreed with Foissner's suggestion that Colpoda fastigata Kah1, 1931,Colpoda matritensis Ocariz et al., 1965 and Paracolpoda maupasi (Enriques, 1908) Lynn, 1975 could be regarded as synonyms of C. maupasi Enriques, 1908. The concept"Colpoda maupasi complex"which could be applied to the similar species and populations of C. maupasi was suggested when exact identification is impossible. It was likely that there were more or less differences in different populations because of the local climate and the specific environmental conditions, although C. maupasi is world-widely distributed.A total of 90 species were found in the soil samples of the Yulong Mountains. Species number was not obviously correlated with increasing sea-level, but the highest two species numbers occurred in the two samples from the lowest two sea-level. The closer the sites were each other, the higher the species identity was within lower sea-level. The results of analysis on faunal similarity of different countries and areas indicated that there were big differences between these faunals.The C/P quotient was 0.82, the most important groups were Colpodids, Hypotrichs, and Gymnostomatids, and most species were bacteriophagous. Species abundance decreased with increasing sea-level. Most individuals often constituted of only few or a few species. It has a long way to go before making it clear that"how many free-living soil ciliates have a restricted distribution"in terms of morphospecies concept.
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