This Marine Hatchery is Raising Baby Lobsters to Give Them a Better Chance in the Wild

Baby lobsters are getting a little extra help at a marine hatchery in Scotland. They spend the beginning of their lives there before eventually heading out to sea, and we got a special peek into the process on social media.

The Forth Marine Hatchery near North Berwick raises European lobsters before releasing them into the Firth of Forth. The project is run by Scottish environmental charity Balanced Horizon.

The idea is to get the lobsters through a particularly vulnerable stage of their lives before sending them into local waters. The hatchery keeps them until they grow into juveniles.

The babies start out pretty small. They have to molt several times before they are ready for the next stage.

The Lobsters Don’t Stay Here Forever

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The hatchery starts with egg-carrying female lobsters. After the eggs hatch, the tiny larvae spend their first weeks growing at the facility. They molt several times before reaching the juvenile stage.

Once they get a little bigger, the young lobsters are kept in individual compartments. Then they are eventually released into the Firth of Forth. Balanced Horizon lists 100,000 lobster releases as one of its goals.

North Berwick Has Been Doing This For Years

The lobster hatchery isn’t new. The original Firth of Forth Lobster Hatchery started in 2010, and the first baby lobsters were released five years later.

Jake Norton has been involved with the project for years and now leads the Forth Marine Hatchery for Balanced Horizon. He told The Fish Site that the lobster side of the hatchery was already well established when Balanced Horizon took it over.

The team is now raising native European flat oysters too, to return them to Scotland’s east coast. Earlier this year, two large outdoor ponds were filled with seawater from North Berwick Harbor to get that part of the project going.

People Got To Release The Lobsters Too

You don’t necessarily have to work at the hatchery to help send one of the babies on its way. On August 30, the public was invited to take part in juvenile lobster releases during the Big Forth Cleanup.

Balanced Horizon and Forth Ports held releases in North Berwick, Kirkcaldy and Anstruther. Everyone who attended could release a hatchery-raised juvenile lobster into the Firth of Forth.