Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research

A A

North Sea equipment

Science at sea requires specialised equipment for sampling. Here we show only a selection. If you want to know more about the instruments -of all shapes and sizes- that ar used for research at sea, please visit the National Marine Facilities (NMF) that maintains and operates a diverse pool of seagoing equipment for the marine science community in The Netherlands.

Box Corer

Bottom sampling | The boxcorer is placed on the seabed and a large weight pushes a tube into the bottom. From the side, a knife cuts an intact piece of the seabed.

Underwater cameras

Underwater cameras

Streaming | Underwater camera’s are mounted on a giant sledge. We drag this one meter above the seabed, while streaming the footage in real-time on board.

Fish cages

Fish sampling | The fish cages have three different sizes: small, medium and large, in order to capture organisms from different sizes and trophic levels.

Small fish traps

Small fish traps

Fish sampling | Small fish traps are used to collect not only small fish, also other types of water critters in these traps as well including shrimp and small crabs.

Bottom dredge

Bottom sampling | The bottom dredge include a pipe dredge and a triangular dredge to sample coarse material such as rocks from the sea floor.

CTD system

Water column sampling | CTD systems are used to collect water samples at depth in the water column, while simultaneously measuring various profiles.

Beam trawl

Bottom sampling | The bottom trawl is used to collect fish and epifauna - animals that live on the surface of the bottom of a hard sea floor like crabs, and mussel.

Van Veen grab

Bottom sampling | Van Veen grabs are used for quick and easy sampling of sediments in shallow and coastal waters, and available in a number of sizes.

Seeves

Bottom sampling | Samples -collected by a box corer- are immediately sieved on large sieves of 1 square metre with a mesh size of 5, 2 and 1 mm.

Multinet

Plankton sampling | The multinet is pulled up vertically through the water column and is used for collecting zoo plankton at 5 different depths.

In situ pump

Water column sampling | This pump gets programmed, fitted with a filter and can then rapidly filter several 100 litres of water used to concentrate micoorganisms.