COLETA

OKEANOS

Coleção de Referência da Biodiversidade Marinha dos Açores

Since 1976, COLETA has gathered over 14,000 biological records of Azorean marine life.

COLETA is OKEANOS's scientific reference collection for the marine biodiversity of the Azores — specimens of fish, corals, crustaceans, molluscs, sponges, echinoderms, algae and many other marine organisms, gathered through decades of scientific campaigns, monitoring programmes and collaborations with local fishermen.

OKEANOS — ORIGINS — YEAR 1976

1976

As the DOP takes its first steps, Helen Martins founds and maintains COLETA, keeping records and supporting operations to maximise the scientific value of DOP's growing campaigns, monitoring programmes and relations with local fishermen.

OKEANOS — ESTABLISHED — YEAR 2006

2006

COLETA is formally established, and keeps growing through research projects, oceanographic cruises and fisheries observation programmes.

OKEANOS — TODAY

TODAY

The collection is being recovered and reorganised, with a new conservation chamber, new conservation equipment, and a recataloging effort, ahead of its next chapter.

Helen Martins, COLETA's founder.

Collections like COLETA are foundational to marine science: they resolve species-identification doubts, document predator-prey relationships and food webs, and give fisheries management and conservation work something concrete to check against.

That value is already showing. COLETA specimens have contributed to peer-reviewed research on taxonomy, population genetics and life history — including a 2019 paper co-authored by OKEANOS's researchers — and its records have helped characterise the Azores' deep-sea vulnerable marine ecosystems, feeding into RAMPA, the region's marine protected area network.

COLETA in numbers

COLETA's last full published count was in 2012. The totals and species-distribution charts below now reflect the current internal database (April 2026) — the collection has kept growing since, with a strong re-cataloguing push since 2017, and an even fuller picture is still on its way.

19,335

Specimens & samples

13,463

Catalogued database entries

Sponges

Porifera

2,345 records

2nd

Corals & sea fans

Cnidaria

5,544 records

1st

Moss animals

Bryozoa

1,082 records

3rd

The three largest groups by record count, current internal database.

37 threatened species

37 specimens in the GBIF-indexed snapshot belong to species formally listed as Vulnerable or Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List.

2 species new to the Azores

Pachastrella ovisternata and Petrosia vansoesti were first recorded for the Azores from COLETA specimens (Pereira, 2013).

A 19th-century thread

COLETA's records have been cross-referenced with historical Azorean specimens from Prince Albert I of Monaco's 19th-century oceanographic campaigns.

Distribution by phylum

Grouped by basic body plan

Distribution by collection method

How specimens arrive

Distribution by class

A tighter group within each phylum

Sources

Specimen & database totals, podium, and the phylum, class & collection-method charts: COLETA's internal database, April 2026 export.

"The Value of a Deep-Sea Collection of the Azores" (Sampaio, Morato, Porteiro et al., 2019, Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, co-authored by OKEANOS researchers) — read the paper.

COLETA's public GBIF-published dataset — the 2012 snapshot, also used for the collection-method chart's pre-2012 figures.

All figures above are periodic snapshots, not a live count — today's holdings, after the collection's ongoing recovery work, will differ.

Coast to deep

COLETA's specimens range from shallow coastal waters to the deep-sea ecosystems of the North Atlantic. Scroll to follow that range, coast to abyss.

Coast

Deep sea

Algae

Molluscs

Mollusca

Fish

Actinopterygii

Crustaceans

Crustacea

Hydroids

Hydrozoa

Moss animals

Bryozoa

Segmented worms

Annelida

Sponges

Porifera

Corals

Anthozoa

Among its deepest holdings, COLETA has helped document the Azores' vulnerable marine ecosystems — deep-sea coral and sponge habitats now recognised as some of the region's most fragile.

DEEP-SEA LAB

MEDIA