So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.
Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.
The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).
The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.
But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
Conservation is so fucken sick
We're doing the same in Whitby, England, and there's a little aquarium attached and it ROCKS. Huge recommend to anyone in England looking for a little fun in the town that made Dracula.
They have a bunch of very happy "berried hens" (i.e. mother lobsters covered in eggs), a set of (essentially) aquatic centrifuges that rock the baby lobsters around to help build their strength against the currents, and a GIANT 35-year-old blue lobster named MELVIN who wanders around in a big tank living his best life, with a couple of sharks for room-mates.
It's a MARVELLOUS time and they're on course to release 100,000 lobster babies a year!
Marine conservation charity in Northeast England. Aiming to conserve, educate and research. Home to Whitby Lobster Hatchery. Releasing 100,0
Not exactly the same thing, but this is my whole job atm, with white claw crayfish! They're native freshwater species, which is mostly impacted by the plague spread by the invasive American Signal crayfish. Last year the zoo I'm a keeper at was the first in this country to start working with them, we collected crayfish from at risk areas, put them in quarantine and did our best with the berried females we received. We have one little survivor from the first year.
This was our first year where we bred them ourselves, and after a lot of research, trial and error, some heartbreak and a lot of experimenting we currently have over 100 craylings! They're doing so well, aside from one batch/clutch/ group that died soon after hatching, we have had no losses from craylings born here. They won't be released this year, we need to grow them on for another year before they can be released. I can't imagine how strange it will feel to finally release them after worrying about them so much, but I'm still really looking forward to that day when it comes.
