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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 8
April 2006
DMR council approves lobster hatchery license
AUGUSTA, ME - The Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) Advisory Council worked its way through a light agenda at its meeting here on March 15.
With just a single, noncontroversial elver rule-making proposal to consider, the bulk of the time was spent discussing and approving three special license applications.
The council opened the meeting by endorsing the slate of officers proposed by its nomination committee. Officers elected for 2006 include: Dana Rice, chair; William Sutter, vice chair; and David Pecci, secretary.
With little discussion, the council unanimously approved the eel regulation, which puts a limit on elver harvest in Mill Brook off Taunton Bay, a stream that also supports an alewife run. The town of Franklin has exclusive rights to harvest the alewives.
To avoid interference with the alewife migration, the rule says elvers can be harvested by dip net only from May 1 to May 31 within 327' downstream of the bridge that crosses Mill Brook.
Robin Alden, executive director of Penobscot East Resource Center (PERC), described the Zone C lobster hatchery that has been built in Stonington and its special license request. The Zone C lobster council supports the hatchery, she said, with PERC providing organizational and operational help to the project.
Characterizing the hatchery as a community-based effort, Alden said the start-up funding came from $27,000 in donations by Zone C lobstermen and the communities in the zone, along with a $25,000 grant secured by PERC and $30,000 from PERC’s operating budget. The hatchery is modeled after the Beals Island Shellfish Hatchery (now the Downeast Institute) in consultation with Dr. Brian Beal of the University of Maine at Machias.
The long-term viability of the hatchery will depend on the willingness of the zone’s fishermen to pay its operating costs each year, according to Alden. The Stonington Lobster Co-op donated use of the building that houses the hatchery, and also pays its electrical costs.
The annual production goal of the hatchery is to raise three batches of about 50,000 juvenile lobsters each per season. It expects to start operations in April and wrap up in October.
The hatchery needs a special license, Alden said, to exempt it from two lobster law provisions. One exemption would enable a named list of Zone C lobstermen, representing each of the zone’s nine districts, to bring in 12-18 egg-bearing females. The lobsters would be held by the hatchery until their eggs hatched. They would then be v-notched and released back into the wild.
In the hatchery, algae will be grown to feed brine shrimp, which will then be fed to the lobster larvae. The larvae will be grown to Stage IV size, about 5/8", and then released into the wild. The second part of the special license is needed to possess the very undersized juvenile lobsters.
Alden explained the procedure for the release phase, which will result in juvenile lobsters being placed in each district of the zone. Meetings were being held with scientists and district lobstermen to identify sites with appropriate habitat and currently nonproductive areas that had had lobsters in the past.
Council member Dana Temple asked whether the survival rate of eggs to the Stage IV size would be higher in the nursery than if the females stayed in the wild.
Alden said there wasn’t information enough to answer that question. The project, however, hopes track the survival of the lobsters released though evaluating the effectiveness of stock enhancement could be costly and complex, she said.
As an example, Alden explained the plan by Rick Wahle of Bigelow Laboratory to arrange dives on four release sites, before, during, and after the juveniles are placed on the bottom. That single season effort could cost $85,000, she said.
With funding from the Northeast Consortium, PERC was convening a two-day workshop in April that would bring together 10 scientists and 10 fishermen to examine feasible, long-term options for evaluation of the hatchery releases.
DMR Commissioner George Lapointe said he was glad that evaluation was an objective in the application. Without it, some could argue that hatcheries take the place of the need for effort controls, he said.
“People will say, ‘put in hatcheries, then we can do whatever we want’,” Lapointe said. “That’s why evaluation is key.”
In response to a question from council member Glen Libby, Alden said the hatchery project had two overriding goals. One is to augment natural settlement, developing technology that might be useful if the stock were to decline.
A second, equally important goal, she said, is community building, laying the groundwork for taking on other fishery management issues and collaborative marine research that could provide benefits into the future.
“Much can be learned by working together, fishermen, scientists, and nonfishing people, in the community,” she said. If hard questions arise in the future, “we will know how to talk to each other.”
The council gave unanimous approval to the hatchery special license request.
The council also approved a request from Capt. John Nicolai that would allow him to haul his demonstration lobster traps during weekends in the summer. His business, Lulu Inc., is taking people out on his lobster boat, and showing them how lobstering is done by hauling traps. He doesn’t keep any of the catch.
The council’s consensus was that the industry benefits from educational operations such as Nicolai’s.
“The demonstration license has worked out well,” Lapointe said. “The more people learn the better off we’ll be.”
A request from Timothy Sheehan of Gulf of Maine (GOM) Inc. was approved as well.
GOM Inc. is a small, for-profit science supply company with seven employees in eastern Washington County. While most of its business is production of preserved dissection specimens, GOM Inc. also supplies some live marine specimens to teachers, aquariums and scientists that are used for educational purposes.
Sheehan sought exemptions from rules for urchins and sea cucumbers to he could collect a small number of live animals by hand harvest.
In other business, Lapointe updated the council on the groundfish emergency rule, which was filed by National Marine Fisheries Service in late February, as well as federal herring and scallop management actions.
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