Development of special-purpose benthic, geo-chemical and biological samplers at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution

While conducting basic research or collecting underwater samples, investigators often find the standard methods or commercially-available tools are inadequate or unsuited for use underwater. This paper describes a number of custom sampling and measurement systems designed at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Inc. (HBOI) over the past several years. These underwater tool systems have been developed in response to specific problems for which a standard approach had not been developed or the previously employed methods and hardware did not provide sufficiently quantitative results. Some of the designs are improvements or simplifications of prior systems while others provide somewhat novel solutions to marine and limnological sampling problems. This paper is primarily concerned with hardware-scientific use and results will be reported elsewhere