On October the 3rd 2012 we will be releasing hundreds of baby lobsters into the wild. Working with the National Lobster Hatchery we will travel to a suitable site, then our divers will release several hundred tiny baby lobsters.
The process usually starts with a phone call from a fisherman to let us know they have landed a female with eggs. If we have room for the mother to be, we will arrange for her arrival and prepare a tank.
The female lobster will be kept until the eggs hatch, this usually happens at night. The baby lobsters (known as larvae) swim off from their mother and are collected by hatchery staff the next morning.
The larvae (which look different from their parents) are then transferred to special rearing tanks where they are fed on plankton. As they grow, they have to shed their shells (known as moulting) after around two weeks they reach their third moult, now they start to look like their parents, and the technicians in the lab need to separate them into individual rearing compartments as they become very aggressive and would fight and kill each other if they could.
During the rearing process the water must be kept perfectly clean if the lobsters are to thrive, our technicians make sure that the water is well filtered and carry out daily tests of the water quality in our lab. In the wild, hardly any of the lobsters would survive the first two weeks, much less than one percent. In a lobster hatchery like ours, over 40% of the young can be expected to survive.
After around three months, the lobsters are tough enough to look after themselves. They are then released back into the wild around the coast of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, in areas where they have the best chance of survival. This is where we, Atlantic Scuba, come in.