The problem of biodiversity concentration in theArctic seas demands the biota survey and monitoring.The monitoring data on the composition and structureof shallow water benthic communities are scarce forthe Barents Sea, because the data on the large (morethan 1 cm in length) species of macrobenthos are lacking. The sampling of this ty pe of benthic animals in thecoastal areas is possible only by means of scuba divingor by dredge; that is why these species are usually nottaken into account during standard hydrobiologicalstudies. The few available publications mention megabenthos distribution in the Barents Sea coastal area[1–3, 6, 10, 11].Kola Bay is the largest fjord of the Russian coast ofthe Barents Sea. However, the data on the currentbiodiversity and distributional patterns of large invertebrates are nearly absent. A detailed description of thefauna of the bay, including megabenthos, but withoutreference to the quantitative parameters, was performed in 1908–1909 by Deryugin [6]. Later studieswere local [4] or were focused at the distribution ofcertain commercial species [3]. That is why thepresent study was aimed to describe current biodiversity and distributional patterns of megabenthos in theupper sublittoral zone of Kola Bay (the Barents Sea).MATERIALS AND METHODSThe sampling was performed at four study sites situated in the southern and ce ntral branches of the KolaBay (Fig. 1) from November 2005 through March2009. Four times a year (different seasons), the sampling was performed by scuba diving. The speciescomposition of megabenthos was analyzed for eacharea. The megabenthos distribution was studied at17 stations, which were located for specific sedimenttype on certain depths (the 0–30 m depth range in thecentral branch of the bay, and the 0–15 m depth rangein the southern branch) (Table 1). Invertebrates weresampled by standard hydrobiological methods [5, 9]using a benthic frame with a 1 m