Ah, back in the Keys again for the summer. After a long and harrowing trip down last Saturday, TJ and I arrived to bright sunny skys, azure blue water, and fish looking at us pleadingly from the water (please fish for me, please). Before we could go fishing though (okay, after we went fishing, but only once. . . ), we needed to to do a bit of work to start off the summer, namely check the collectors for baby lobsters (or puerulus postlarvae as we lobster nerds like to say). We picked up our intrepid leader (Michael) from the airport in Miami on Tuesday and headed out to check the collectors on Friday, which had been floating on the ocean side of Long and Matecumbe Keys since late March of this year, accumulating lots of algae, sediment, and yes, tiny, clear, and exceedingly cute baby lobsters like the one you see on my finger above. Forget baby dolphins, baby lobsters are way cuter. . .
Checking collectors, such as the one you see above could be construed as hard work, even on a gorgeous sunny day like yesterday. First the boat approaches the collector, moving into the wind. Next Pete reaches down with a giant bag and captures the collector, which is floating about a foot under the water. TJ unhooks the whole shootin' match from the anchor and Pete hauls it all on board. Next, each section of the collector (sheets of genuine hogs hair filter material made for industrial air handling units) is checked meticulously for little lobsters, many of which are completely transparent.
Some, like those you see above, are a bit easier to spot. The little stripy lobsters are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd stages, which have probably been on the collectors for over a month now. After checking, the collectors go back into the water for another few days, before they are pulled again. After 28 collectors, my arms felt like they were about to fall off. But it was all worth it for the little buggers you see below.
The striped pattern on the lobster helps it hid in the algae habitat it normally would settle in, but makes it stand out a bit against the blue hogs hair. All the better for us. We had a pretty good haul and ended up with about 450 lobsters total in two buckets.
What can I say. I was a hot day and I was really dirty. . . not a bad time for a swim once that 28th collector was back in the water. After we got back to the house, we tagged all the lobsters with a little magnetic piece of wire. A very expensive and delicate machine injects these through the needle you see below into the tail of the lobster. We can then release these tiny modified Robo-lobsters back on to our sites. Every month, we will take the metal detector and check each lobster to see if it is one that we released.
Not bad for a day's work. Tomorrow we seed the lobsters onto the sites, should be fun!
