Super cool to hear about your lobster conservation project!!! And congratulations on hatching so many!
I have a question about releasing captive bred animals into the wild. And sorry on my wording I can't figure out how to put this without sounding like I'm devils advocating when that's super not what I'm doing. Like, I am very pro boosting wild populations of animals through breeding efforts!!
I know its a native animal you're releasing into their environment but is there ever converns about stresses to that environment when a sudden population boom? It seems like less of a concern with an ocean since, ocean so big. Its a question I always think about when I hear about hundreds of animals being introduced into the wild. But I do trust that conservationists are doing the leg work to make sure the animals they're reintroducting will benefit the ecosystem. I'm just curious how places that had less of an animal population can handle suddenly having many more.
That’s a very reasonable concern and it is definitely something conservationists have to consider (sometimes animals have to be released in waves so they don’t overwhelm the environment.)
In this case, we’re not super worried about that for a few reasons:
1. Many of those baby lobsters are still going to get eaten or die from disease/injury/other natural cause. It’s extremely unlikely that all of them will make it. It’s best to release a lot of young animals at once because that makes it more likely that at least some will make it to adulthood.
2. The main reason we’re experimenting with this hatchery program is because wild larval lobsters are struggling to survive due to warming seas. The blooms of food they rely on are happening earlier and they’re missing it, so fewer lobsters are making it to the benthic stage. We’re probably just evening out this year’s babies and returning it to what it has been in the past.
3. The Gulf of Maine is like, lobster paradise. It’s capable of supporting hundreds of millions of lobsters. In fact, we catch over 100 million pounds of lobster every single year in the gulf and the population is very stable and shows no signs of overharvesting (yet). 500 additional lobsters is very unlikely to cause any problems in a place that easily supports like 200 million of them.
So tldr; the Gulf of Maine is an ideal environment for abundant lobsters, their larval populations are declining, and most of the babies probably won’t survive to adulthood and won’t significantly impact the population.
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