The next question is “how long can the fishery sustain itself at current levels?” Asking these and other questions through years of rigorous research building on demonstration projects, Dr. Brian Beal is seeking practical applications that can help insure the economic survival of the fishing community into which he was born. Beal is founder and director of DEI, a non-profit organization funded by federal and state grants as well as private funding. The property holdings include a 9600-square-foot shellfish production facility, a 1000-square-foot education center, two lobster pounds and more than 2,000 feet of deep-water frontage. The facility also serves as a marine field station for the University of Maine at Machias where Beal has been a professor since 1985.

Although Maine has had record lobster landings in the past decade, there are no guarantees that this largess can continue indefinitely. This is one reason Beal continues his decades-long lobster research, that began in 1986 with a community-based lobster hatchery in Cutler. Lobster culture was the focus of his Fulbright fellowship to Ireland in 2000-2001 and today, after years of trials, he has living proof of an important discovery.

Among the 200 variously-sized tanks circulating with salt water, sits one shallow tray holding scallop shells and pvc pipe sections. Beal reaches in and carefully lifts out two young lobsters. One is about 5 inches long and the about 2 inches. “These are the same age,” says Beal. “I call it the ‘goldfish effect.’ We recently discovered that the lobster will grow in size according to the size of its grow-out container” In this 13-month field trial in the waters off Great Wass he placed lobsters into five different sized containers. Growth in the smaller containers was significantly slower than growth in the two largest containers. “The results are very encouraging and suggest that it is possible to produce lobsters over a relatively short period of time that can be tagged and released”. This may help prove the viability of lobster hatcheries and nurseries to help sustain the resource.

Lobsters are just one species in a facility filled with over 12 million shellfish in all stages of development. Partnering with Joe Porada of Acadia Sea Farms in Trenton, hardshell clams (quahog) are being grown for an aquaculture site. Next to Porada’s juvenile clams, are netted bags of the same species of quahog from New York, part of a reciprocal trial to determine if genetics or DEI’s over-winter techniques account for the 99% survival rate. There are also projects with scallops and oysters, but it is the region’s indigenous soft-shell clam that has put DEI on the aquaculture map.

Millions of softshell seed clams have been produced by the facility in the past 20 years and have been used for enhancing stocks on municipal clam flats in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and eastern Canada.

During this same period, Cobscook Bay had a sharp decline in its clam population. “We were slowly losing our clam base; there were hundreds of acres with no clams” according to local fisherman, Dexter Lyons who began trying various methods of clam seeding. In 1998, Lyons set out panels of hatchery-reared clams with flexible netting on the Edmund’s flats and carefully recorded the results. Today as part of a DEI program inspired by Lyon’s earlier work, a private clam-farming pilot is in its fourth year and showing impressive results.

This program, which will lead to individually licensed plots, is being closely watched by other towns. Department of Marine Resources manager, Denis Nault works with municipalities regulating ordinances that license and oversee clam harvesting. “DEI, with its seed hatchery and research, has been a critical cog that my program needs to help communities.” Nault who is ‘ironing out’ the specific regulations for oversight said “other municipalities have expressed interest in this type of aquaculture.”

Meanwhile, Cobscook Bay has experienced a spike in natural clam seeding. “Cobscook is buried in seed,” said Lyons. “I am as impressed with the wild stock as I am with the farmed.”

Beal realizes that when there is a bountiful harvest there is little interest or money for research or aquaculture. He also believes that the best time to study a resource is when it is plentiful, “when there is no pressure”. “What we are looking for is ‘can it be done?'”.

For more information visit: http://www.downeastinstitute.org.

Coverage of Washington County is made possible by a grant from the Eaton Foundation.

Leslie Bowman is a freelance writer and photographer living in Trescott, Maine