“In the ocean, the survival rate of lobsters is less than one out of one thousand,” said David Mills, whose lobster hatchery is part of his Mount Desert Oceanarium. “We’ve had some years of 15 to 20 percent survival.”
That’s an achievement, but the story of Mills’s success started with years of failure as he sought to find a way to grow lobsters from egg to post-larval stage prior to returning them to the sea.
He got the idea for starting a lobster hatchery at the 1986 Fishermen’s Forum, where someone from Massachusetts spoke about the hatchery he was running.
Mills, who had been operating the Oceanarium since 1972, realized he already had water running through his building for the animals on display, and he knew a number of local fishermen who might be induced to bring him egg-bearing females. Three years later the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) began funding lobster hatcheries through the Lobster Seed fund. Mills applied for and received a supplementary grant for operating the hatchery
But out of 12 tanks built in three years, Mills successfully grew out only 30 lobsters. He kept calling marine scientists, asking where he’d gone wrong. He visited other kinds of hatcheries, trying to figure out a way to keep his hatchlings alive, but nothing worked until Sam Chapman, who was attempting to operate a lobster hatchery at the University of Maine’s Darling Center in Walpole, looked through a door and spotted a different method: one for growing oysters. “He tried it that way,” he said, “and it worked. He then passed the information on to me.”
Audrey Mills, David’s wife, explained, “Larval lobster need a lot of water and a lot of space, and you have to keep the water moving, otherwise they start chomping on each other.”
David Mills, who teaches about marine life and commercial fishing in Maine at the Oceanarium, said he and Audrey said to each other, “this is cool.” The hatchery fit right in with what they were doing. So they rented a tiny room in Bar Harbor for it, which their son, Peter, managed for four years.
Starting about 1991, Mills got a permit to have Winter Harbor lobstermen Reggie Knowles, Dale Torrey and others from nearby ports and harbors got permission to hold “berried” (egg-bearing) females they trapped. Nowadays, Mills has a special license that names the fishermen permitted to work with egg-bearing females and post-larval lobster.
Torrey and his sternman Mary Lou Weaver and the others took the females, kept them in crates in the water, and checked on them daily until their thousands and thousands of black eggs turned brown with a black dot in the center. That meant the females were ready to release their eggs. Peter Mills told Torrey, Weaver and other permitted fishermen: “When you see the change from black to brown, bring them to me quick.”
“We’d race to Bar Harbor in the boat to put them in the tank,” Weaver recalled. Once there, circulating water in the tanks kept the tiny, cannibalistic lobsters from eating one another, and Mills and his crew feed the ill-tempered creatures krill-like brine shrimp.
When the lobsters had molted three times and had grown to three-eighths of an inch long, it was time for the lobstermen to come pick them up, carry them out to undisclosed areas and release them on cobbled bottom where the post-larval babies could hide from predators. The fishermen also took the now-eggless females from the hatchery and returned them to the ocean so they can reproduce again.
The lobstermen have been doing their low-tech lobster conservation for about 14 years now. In early August Torrey reported, “A week and a half ago I let 3,000 go. They used to be 3/8-inch long and clear. Now they’re 3/4-inch long and have blue or orange or black spots.”
Weaver said during the years she worked as Torrey’s sternman, “David gave us a Coleman cooler with a tiny pump to keep the water circulating.” She described a long length of hose clamped on the area where one would drain liquid from the cooler. The other end of the hose had a brick attached. As Torrey passed over the secret areas, he idled as the brick bumped along the ocean bottom while Weaver, who had been pinching her end of the hose to keep the baby lobsters in the cooler, loosened her hold and set thousands of post-larval lobsters free over the cobblestone.
It takes four to seven years for a post-larval lobster to grow to legal, or “counter,” size.
Weaver said of Torrey, “He would get so excited in spring,” as he’d tell her of all the lobsters he’d seen on the bottom. “Winter Harbor has had an abundance of lobster,” she said. “To him and the older fishermen, it’s preserving the species for their sons.” (Torrey has also been known to pluck a large female from a young lobsterman’s catch, saying, “Don’t you know that’s a breeder?” before returning it to the water.)
Torrey said when he checks on the bottom where he released the babies, he sees hundreds of juvenile lobsters ranging from four to seven or eight inches long: small enough to escape through the vent and wire squares of a trap.
Torrey and Weaver feel strongly about letting the public know that the state cut funds for lobster hatcheries. Weaver said, “The lobster conservation effort is having an effect on fishermen Dale’s sons’ age. They’re catching those lobsters released seven years ago.”
“Nobody has thanked David for what he has done,” Torrey continued. “[The Island Institute] gave me an award for raising and releasing baby lobsters, but there wouldn’t have been any baby lobsters if David hadn’t gone through the whole process of learning how to raise them. He kept at it until he conquered it.”