New Way to Raise Lobsters
There's a mystery in the waters off the coast of Maine - one that has seafood lovers salivating. Why are there so many lobsters?
Last year's lobster catch topped 56 million pounds - more than triple the catch in the mid 1980s.
"Over the course of the last ten years, there's been a massive increase in the number of lobsters, but no one really has a good idea why," says Dr. Brian Beal, associate professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine at Machias.
But while Beal and fellow researchers are at a loss to explain why Maine has become such a lobster paradise, they're hoping to learn from the population explosion to see how they might be able to keep it steady during leaner times.
"In a few years, the catch could decline back to where it was ten years ago," says Beal, a former lobsterman. "If we begin looking at ways to improve the catch, even though we're looking good right now, it will be very helpful in the future."
Typically, enhancement programs release lobsters to the bottom at sizes of less than an inch because there is too little space in the hatchery or lab to hold them. These small lobsters - usually about the size of a penny - are easy targets for fish, crab and other predators and are too small to tag and determine if they ever make it, says Beal.
"I wanted to see if we could find a way to put these small lobsters out in their natural environment in individual containers and have them survive and grow by letting them feed on the type of organisms that typically foul things like wharves and the bottoms of boats," says Beal.
At the National University of Ireland's Galway Shellfish Research Laboratory in Carna, Beal conducted his studies by suspending mesh containers and petri dishes of the tiny crustaceans three feet off the ocean floor.
"Not only did they survive, they grew," he says. "About 50 to 75 percent of the animals survived for the 10 months of the experiment."
"It was such a weird idea that no ever thought about doing it," he says. "The thinking has always been that you could produce many, many numbers of small lobsters to be released, or you could produce a few large ones, continue to feed them in the hatchery and then release them. No one really seemed interested in trying this technique."
Beal hopes this information can be used to improve the catch in the future, even if things are looking good right now. "There's a significant threat in not understanding what controls the dynamics of the lobster population and how long we will be able to maintain this level," he says.
But Beal's research could mean more than lobsters on tables in seafood restaurants. He's also studying how to improve the soft-shell clam industry. "The catch has not been great for the last fifteen years," he says. "The capacity for clam numbers is much higher than what we're actually finding."
Beal and his colleagues have been studying the best ways to culture clams since 1987. "No one's really done this," he says. "We began producing them in a hatchery environment. But then what do you do with them once you have them? Where do you plant them? How thickly? Should you try to protect them? All these things were unknown to us then and we've spent the last 15 years honing in on the answers."
"Although we've enhanced flats [the stretches of mud exposed at low tide that clams thrive in] and been successful ourselves, what's most important about this research is the information we're able to give to communities that allow them to make judgments about their flats that they couldn't make before."
Feel free to contact Beal directly for more information about any of his research subjects. You can reach him in his office at 207-255-1314 or by email at [email protected]. Please contact me at 814-867-1963 if there's anything further that I can provide; we help UMM with some of its public affairs work.
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