COMMERCE
Subscriber Services
Classified Ads
Subscribe
Advertise
NEWS
This Month
Editorial
Letters
F/V Safety
Past Issues
ABOUT US
Contact Us
Latest Issue
Subscribe
History
MORE CONTENT
CFN Archives
Links
Each month exclusively in the PRINT edition of CFN
Along the Coast
Ask the Lobster Doc
Bearin’s
Classifieds
Coming Events
Editorial
Enforcement Report
FISH SAFE
Fleet Additions
Letters
Lobster Market Report
New Boats
News Catch
Quahog Market Report
|
Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 2
October 2007
Hughes pioneered lobster hatchery science
OAK BLUFFS, MA – The Massachusetts State Lobster Hatchery and Research Station on Martha’s Vineyard hasn’t hatched juvenile lobsters since 1995. Today, the facility’s second floor offices are busy but the ground floor is full of empty plastic and fiberglass tanks. The electric saltwater pumps haven’t run for a while.
Yet, in its day, the year-round hatchery in Oak Bluffs on the shore of Lagoon Pond was state-of-the-art, employing as many as five workers and volunteers and turning out a half-million lobsters a year.
Lobsters were hatched and raised to a 1" length and then released into the wild. The whole process, from hatching eggs to release, took about four months. Commercial lobstermen licensed by the state to gather female egg-bearing lobsters kept the hatchery busy.
Built in 1948 as a measure to counter intense fishing of the state’s most valued seafood resource, the hatchery’s first season was in 1950. John T. Hughes, now 85, was the director of the hatchery from the time it was built until he retired in 1983. He has fond memories of those successful years and believes his work made a difference in protecting the resource from overfishing and decline.
For some time, the hatchery was the center of the universe when it came to lobster research. Aquaculture specialists came from around the world to tour the facility, including some from Harvard Medical School interested in the hormones that drive the “personality” of the animal.
Summer tour buses, schools, and visitors sought out the hatchery. In a given year, 40,000-50,000 people toured the facility, learning about the stages of a juvenile lobster’s development and the fundamentals of aquaculture.
And Hughes remembers having close relationships with lobstermen all along the eastern seaboard.
Discovery
Like raising shellfish, hatchery specialists found warmer water sped up lobster growth, though temperatures above 70°F, which was not uncommon in the heat of summer, stressed the juveniles.
They also found that good water quality was important to hatching success rates.
The lobster hatchery environment created a lot of special problems. To keep the growing animals from eating each other, they were well fed and separated through the movement of water. As the lobsters grew bigger, they were kept apart, isolated in little plastic cages.
Hard to prove
Though the hatchery was able to raise and release hundreds of thousands of baby lobsters a year into the wild, the biggest hurdle to overcome was proving that the releases made a difference in the stock.
At the time, such a small lobster couldn’t be tagged and monitored and, therefore, couldn’t be distinguished from one hatched in the wild.
There were experiments with genetic blue lobsters, but it was later observed that blue lobsters were easy targets for predators. In the end, there was never certainty that the animals survived when released. Hughes said he would have liked to have proved it.
He also would have liked to have kept the young lobsters longer to grow bigger and more resistant to predators.
Better yet, Hughes said he would have liked to have stocked a coastal estuary and just monitored the recruitment of lobsters in that area over a span of years. It takes about seven years for a lobster to get to harvestable size in most Massachusetts waters.
Hughes said a state legislative mandate requiring all lobsters raised at the hatchery to be released statewide from the New Hampshire border to the Rhode Island line made it difficult to prove the effectiveness of the hatchery program.
Still, while there was a routine in raising and releasing baby lobsters, Hughes said he was proudest of the level of expertise that developed at the hatchery. At one point, the Vineyard facility was the oldest, continuously running lobster hatchery in the world.
“We were the first to be able to close the life cycle of the American lobster,” Hughes said. “And we were able to do it because the hatchery was open 12 months a year.”
Mark Alan Lovewell
Back to story list
|
|
Tell us what you think.
