If the experiment conducted by Sam Chapman of the Univcrsity of Maine's Darling Marine Center is a success, lobstermen should see a lot more blue lobsters turning up in their traps in a few years. This past summer, Chapman and his research associates released over 6000 juvenile blue lobsters in the mid-coast area near Damariscove Island and in Pemaquid Harbor. The real question is: Will these lobsters survive for the six or seven years it takes for them to become harvestable size adults?

In 1986, at the Darling Center in Walpole, Chapman began developing the technology to hatch and release lobsters. In this culture system, algae are fed to brine shrimp which are then fed to lobsters. In the spring of that same year, the Cutler Marine Hatchery was established in Downeast Maine. This hatchery, which used feeding techniques developed in Walpole, was the first privately operated, fishermen-sponsored lobster rearing facility in the United States .

For three years now, thousands of lobsters have been hatched, raised, and released in coastal Maine waters. The Darling Center alone has released almost 90,000 baby lobsters. Lobstermen provide partial support for the Cutler Hatchery through the stateadministered Seed Lobster Fund. Both the state and lobstermen now want to determine whether lobster hatcheries are effective before they expand the program. According to Irv Kornfield, of the University of Maine's Center for Marine Studies, if three percent of the lobsters released by hatcheries survive until they are of legal size, hatcheries will be considered economically feasible for the fishery.

To determine whether hatcheries are effective, lobsters must be marked in some way so that researchers will know how many hatchery-raised animals are trapped. Most hatchery-raised lobsters are ready to be released (have reached stage IV development) in two weeks. Lobsters can be marked with a microwire tag but they must first be raised until they are three or four months old. Microwire tagging is also a very tedious method when there are thousands of lobsters to tag. And finally, specialized equipment is necessary to detect lobsters that carry microwire. This would make it difficult for fishermen to identify which lobsters in their traps were raised in a hatchery.

"Color-coded" blue lobsters were chosen as a way to differentiate those that are hatchery-raised from those that develop naturally in the wild. Blue lobsters are ideal because they are very rare--occurring one in four million--and they are easy to spot. However, the question still remains whether blue lobsters survive as well as normal ones.

In addition to the "baby blues" released last summer, Chapman is rearing several hundred juvenile lobsters that resulted from a number of crosses, such as a blue male mated with a normal female and a blue male mated with a bluish/normal female. This will help researchers determine the color ratio of blue or bluish lobsters to normal greenish-brown ones, and to establish the genetics of lobster coloration . One goal of the project is to develop a broodstock of three or four dozen pure blue females which will supply the thousands of juveniles needed for future work.

For the next stage of this research, Chapman and his associates will sample sites where the blue lobsters were released, try new release sites along the coast, and develop more "color-coded" lines from rare yellow and red lobsters.

Funding for the lobster hatchery project was provided by the Maine Lobstermen's Association, the Lobster Advisory Council of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, the Fisheries and Aquaculture Research Group (FARG) of the University's Agricultural Experiment Station, the Maine Aquaculture Association, and the Maine Lobster Institute.