Zooplankton and marine particles sampling instruments

Plankton has been traditionally sampled using nets and niskin bottles illustrated in the traditional plankton sampling gear.

Marine Snow Catcher is one of the instrument that can be used to sample sinking marine particles.

More recent instruments include imaging systems such as the Underwater Vision Profiler 5 (Picheral et al., 2010) and 6, its more recent version. These in situ imaging system were designed to detect, measure and quantify the distribution of zooplankton organisms and marine particles. The images captured by these instruments are then saved on the Ecotaxa platform and through a software called Zooprocess, we have access to 42 morphological descriptors such as size, transparency, complexity, ect. Note that the relative size of the instruments are not respected here.

See below some examples of images of organisms captured by the UVP5: