So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason weβre doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. Theyβre plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and theyβre missing it.
Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until theyβre big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when theyβre able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we donβt have a major crash in a decade or two.
The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).
The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.
But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who havenβt settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely donβt even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldnβt have been there otherwise.
Conservation is so fucken sick
