COLETA

OKEANOS

Coleção de Referência da Biodiversidade Marinha dos Açores

Since 1976, COLETA has gathered over 19,000 biological records of Azorean marine life.

COLETA is the OKEANOS's scientific reference collection for the marine biodiversity of the Azores — it preserves specimens of sponges, corals, crustaceans, molluscs, including cephalopods, echinoderms, fish and several other marine taxonomic groups, gathered through five 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 understood the scientific value of a biodiversity reference collection. She founded and curated COLETA, keeping voucher specimens to support research on biodiversity and conservation of marine resource and habitats of the Azores coastal and deep-sea waters. Helen collected specimens from any campaign, monitoring program and from the fruitful win-win relationship she established with local fishermen.

OKEANOS — ESTABLISHED — YEAR 2006

2006

The collection was formally coined with the name COLETA, and keeps growing through research projects, oceanographic cruises and fisheries observation programmes. The solid COLETA catalogue was finally established. Deep-sea faunas were systematically collected and preserved to support the growing scientific projects, unveiling the wonders living over the bottoms of the Azores region.

OKEANOS — TODAY — YEAR 2026

TODAY 2026

The old collection is being recovered and reorganised; OKEANOS acquired a new climate-controlled storage room and new optical and photo equipment, and is pushing for a new curation and cataloguing effort. The work is supported by the infrastructure project PORBIOTA.

Helen Martins, COLETA's founder.

Collections like COLETA are foundational to marine science: they allow for species inventories, resolve species-identification doubts, document species distribution contributing to biogeographic approaches, allow for ecological studies as predator-prey relationships and food webs, and give fisheries management and conservation efforts something concrete to check against.

That value already showed up. COLETA specimens have contributed to peer-reviewed research on taxonomy, population genetics and life history and its records have helped characterise the Azores' deep-sea vulnerable marine ecosystems, feeding into the process to define the updated Azores Marine Protected Areas Network (RAMPA).

For more information about COLETA see: Sampaio et al. 2019.

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 class

A tighter group within each phylum

Distribution by collection method

How specimens arrive

Sources

OKEANOS - Institute of Marine Sciences, University of the Azores (2026). COLETA reference collection database [unpublished data]. Internal export, April 2026 — used for the specimen & database totals, podium, and the phylum, class & collection-method charts above.

Sampaio, Í., Morato, T., Porteiro, F., Gutiérrez-Zárate, C., Taranto, G., Pham, C., Gonçalves, J. & Carreiro-Silva, M. (2019). The Value of a Deep-Sea Collection of the Azores (NE Atlantic Ocean): Marine invertebrate biodiversity in an era of global environmental change. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, 3, e37209. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.37209

IMAR-Azores/DOP-UAç (2015). COLETA - IMAR/DOP-UAz reference collection from 1977 to 2012. Occurrence dataset. https://doi.org/10.14284/23 — the 2012 snapshot.

All figures above are periodic snapshots, not a live count.

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