MACHIAS — Two top officials from the republic of Ireland, representing an Irish- or Gaelic-speaking economic development agency known as Udaras na Gaeltachta, recently traveled to Washington County to tour local aquaculture sites.

Ruan O’Bric and Sean O’Naechtnan accompanied Brian Beal, assistant professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine at Machias, to sites on Beals Island, Cutler, Eastport and Lubec.

Ireland is similar in geographic size to Maine and relies heavily on fishing and creating products from its fisheries. Since the early 1980s, salmon and shellfish aquaculture in Ireland has become an important business, especially on the west coast where there are large pockets of traditional culture and language.

Ireland was once a major producer of European lobster, Homarus gammarus, but recently that industry has fallen on hard times due primarily to the lack of an effective management program for the species. Several groups in Ireland are now staging an effort to culture baby lobsters to enhance existing, but dwindling, stocks.

Professor Beal was invited in November 1992 to present a paper at an aquaculture symposium in Galway that focused on the Cutler Marine Hatchery effort. He accompanied lobster biologist Robert Bayer and two graduate students from the University of Maine. During their five-day visit, they toured various fish and shellfish culture facilities and a shellfish research laboratory where larval and juvenile lobsters are being raised.

Beal was invited again to Ireland in March of this year for three weeks to assist researchers in devising better culture systems that would result in high lobster survival through their delicate planktonic stage.

“They were using a culture technique that was, at best, allowing a 5 percent survival of larvae to the first bottom stage, and that was just not acceptable,” said Beal. “The first thing I did was to closely examine the larvae of the European lobster using a microscope. Seeing that it looked remarkably similar to ours, Homarus americanus, I devised a plan that essentially copied the system that aquaculture specialist Sam Chapman and I had worked on for several years at Cutler. After several trials, they are now consistently acheiving survival rates of 50 percent and I have recently learned that researchers from Italy and England have adopted this culture system.”

While in Washington County, the economic development officials visited the Beals Island Regional Shellfish Hatchery and Cutler Marine Hatchery. “We wanted to get a sense of the size of those two programs that have received considerable attention in Ireland,” said agency executive director O’Bric.