Provision of wild zooplankton harvested directly from the sea.
The Planktonic Collections Centre, inaugurated in 2011, harbours nearly 20,000 plankton samples from around the world and preserved in formaldehyde. In particular, it holds samples from a long-term monitoring project at point B in the Villefranche-sur-Mer Bay (sampling with WP2, Juday-Bogorov and Regent nets since 1966) as well as samples from the Tara expeditions (Oceans, Polar Circle and Mediterranean).
The biosafety containment infrastructure with a surface area of 128 m² holds flasks labelled with barcodes and — when possible — digitised by the Quantitative Imaging Core Facility at Villefranche-sur-Mer.