The KANAMECO 2024 campaign is part of the Tropical Deep Sea Benthos (TDSB) and La Planète Revisitée (LPR) programs of the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN), with the objectives of describing benthic biodiversity and understanding its history. evolution and its role in ecosystems. The large number of samples collected during these expedition programs allow multi-scale analysis, and KANAMECO 2024 completes this sampling in New Caledonia, where several coastal and deep expeditions have been organized in recent years. The collections made during this campaign will be the subject of an in-depth study and, if necessary, taxonomic descriptions by an international network of taxonomists , and will also feed several research projects, including the ERC HYPERDIVERSE, which aims to understand the evolutionary mechanisms behind the hyperdiversification of a group of marine molluscs, and the marine organism genome sequencing project, PEPR ATLASEA.

The objectives of KANAMECO 2024 are:

1. to fill our taxonomic gaps, with an emphasis on the plurality of collection methods and areas of the EEZ that have not been or little explored until now;
2. to position New Caledonian biodiversity in a global context, by clarifying the phylogenetic relationships between species;
3. to understand the macro-evolutionary processes at the origin of this biodiversity, in particular to identify the keys to the evolutionary success of the groups studied.

The achievement of these objectives is based on a well-established sampling strategy and a campaign plan which made it possible to explore the external slopes of the South West lagoon, by dredging and trawling (75 operations) and the hauling of the 33 lumun-lumun nets deposited by the end of 2022 along the Aboré reef. The campaign at sea was coupled with a workshop on land, made up of a team of divers (coastal collections and support for the hauling of lumun-lumun type nets), and several teams ensuring the sorting of samples (collected on the ship or by divers), their fixation for DNA sequencing, in particular for complete genomes as part of the PEPR ATLASEA project, and their documentation by photos. Another team carried out an educational component, with the participation of several local schools, around issues linked to biodiversity and microplastic pollution.