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An EU project organised between Ireland, Spain and Norway
may have found a way to secure the future of lobster stocks
in European waters.
Under the ‘AquaReg’ programme that began over 4 years
ago, the project team, coordinated by Alan Drumm of the Marine
Institute, has come up with an innovative way to increase
the cost-effectiveness of producing juvenile lobsters with
little or no environmental impact.
The project, which is still in its pilot phase in Ireland,
originally focused on using Irish and Norwegian expertise
to design a cost-efficient method of producing juvenile lobsters
in Galicia, where overfishing in the region has led to a significant
decline in lobster stocks.
“The traditional method of producing juvenile lobsters using
land-based systems where they have to be fed individually,
has always been labour intensive and expensive” - explains
Alan. Instead, the project team is using individual sea cages
suspended in a food rich environment - such as a mussel farm
- where lobsters can feed naturally between mussel lines without
any further human intervention.
Trials in Galicia in Spain and in three different locations
in Ireland have proven extremely successful for the production
of juvenile lobsters. Aside from the cost-effectiveness of
this technique, it also allows the juvenile lobsters to grow
to a relatively large size with minimal human contact. Feeding
on natural plankton provides them with a more balanced diet
and produces a more natural colouration.
In Ireland, though we have a reasonably healthy population
of lobster compared with project partners Spain and Norway,
restocking could be very useful in areas where there is a
lack of supply of juvenile lobsters. "What we are doing
now is developing the tools that can be used for stock enhancement
and it’s good to know the option is there if we need it” -
adds Alan.
According to the project’s lead scientist, Dr. Ronan Browne
of NUI Galway, lobsters have a very slow growth rate, hate
breeding in captivity, have a low survival rate and are famous
for their highly cannibalistic tendencies. Attempts to rear
lobsters in a cost-efficient way have been attempted for hundreds
of years with mixed and often disappointing results.
“The next stage of the project is critical” - says Ronan.
“The survival rate of juvenile lobsters released into the
wild, will dictate the commercial viability of a lobster restocking
programme. All eggs used in a restocking programme would come
from locally-caught females - so, our native lobsters will
still breed naturally along the Irish coast, while their offspring
will be reared through the programme to increase their chances
of survival.”
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