Lobster Hatchery Started in Cutler Town Office

One Maine lobster hatchery was funded through the Lobster Fund. In 1986 University of Maine professor Brian Beal, who started the Beals Island Shellfish Hatchery, and local lobstermen applied to the Fund for money start a small hatchery in Cutler. “We received the funds and converted the basement of the Cutler Town Office into a hatchery,” Beal recalled.

The enterprising group drew on the techniques developed by John Hughes, director of the Massachusetts Lobster Hatchery located in Martha’s Vineyard, which reported a 50% survival rate for larvae grown to the IV molt stage (ready to settle on the seafloor). “We got a 5% survival rate. I talked to the people at the Vineyard hatchery, explained that we were using their methods. They explained they typically had a 5% to 10% survival rate, not 50%,” Beal said wryly.

Beal and colleagues went back to the drawing board. It took years but they finally achieved a 50% to 60% survival rate, according to Beal. There were three factors that made the difference.

First, they had to catch the larvae as soon as the eggs hatched from the female. Second, the larvae needed to be kept in seawater in which there was a super-abundance of food so that whenever the larvae opened their mouth parts, food floated in. And third, young lobsters are cannibals and must be kept away from each other. Beal developed a clever technique to do that: he made the water bubble so vigorously that the tiny creatures could not reach each other. “Their water was like syrup. And they survived,” he said.

The Cutler lobster hatchery continued to receive funding from the Lobster Fund until 1992. “We couldn’t answer one question. How well are they surviving on the bottom [after release]? We just didn’t know,” Beal said. Without state funding, the hatchery soon closed. As the Gulf of Maine lobster population started its remarkable increase beginning in 2000, the question of how to augment the stocks became less important to lobstermen and to fishery managers.