ROCKLAND – From satellites to the sterns of lobster boats, scientists have gathered significant new information about the life of lobsters in the Gulf of Maine, enough to predict how many of the crustaceans will be caught up to seven years into the future.

The work, undertaken over the last four years, also has led to a new understanding of the ecology of Penobscot Bay, and why it is such a fertile region for lobster.

The Penobscot Bay Marine Resources Collaborative is a five-year project funded by the federal government. After four years, scientists have reached some illuminating conclusions, which were announced at a press conference at the Island Institute Wednesday.

One is that counts of lobster larvae – the creatures that are less than a month old – are down significantly. The sampling of larvae begun three years ago first indicated a downturn. Lobsters take about seven years to reach the legal size for harvesting, so the projection is that landings will be lower in 2004 and 2005.

David Cousens, president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said some of the same scientists working on the Pen Bay Collaborative sampled larvae in 1993 and 1994, and predicted the record landings of the last few years. Last year, some 60 million pounds of lobster was caught in Maine.

“These guys were dead-on,”

Cousens said, referring to the predictions of record hauls.

In the past, scientists from outside the state predicted the lobster fishery was on the verge of collapse, hurting their credibility among those working in the industry, he said.

“Fishermen didn’t trust the scientists, and scientists didn’t think fishermen could provide good data,” Cousens said. “The good thing about this whole study was that it brought scientists and fishermen together, and not in an adversarial [relationship],” he said.

“We can’t argue with this data, because we generated it,” Cousens said.

Lobster fishermen brought scientists participating in the Pen Bay Collaborative aboard their boats about 300 times over the past four years, Carl Wilson of the Department of Marine Resources said.

In each of the four years of sampling, there was a drop observed in what is known as the “settlement” of juvenile lobster, from the top of the water column where they float until they are about 30 days old, to the cobble-bottoms they favor.

“That’s a warning sign,” Wilson said.

Once the juvenile lobster reaches the bottom, they have a very low mortality rate, until they are harvested when they are about 7 years old.

Lew Incze of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay Harbor said the lower number of larvae may actually be a return to historical averages.

Cousens said landings have averaged about 20 million pounds over the last century. “We’re at three times that now,” he said.

The information provided by the study is “helpful for financial planning of your business,” Cousens said. It also suggests that overfishing is not the problem.

“We’re not the reason for the upturn, and we’re not the reason for the downturn,” he said.

One surprising result of the research is that scientists now believe many of the lobster larvae that settle to the bottom of Penobscot Bay come from far away.

Anne Hayden, who managed the project for the Island Institute, used the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service – a sister agency to the National Weather Service – to map currents in the Gulf of Maine.

The satellite imagery and surface sampling surprised scientists when they indicated that the primary force in the bay was not the Penobscot River, which drains one-quarter of the state.

Instead, they learned that ten times more water than the river dumps into the bay comes into the estuary from the Eastern Maine Coastal Current. That current seems to circulate clockwise around Vinalhaven and North Haven, while also producing a counterclockwise rotation beginning at Isle au Haut and traveling northeast to the southern tip of Islesboro.

The Eastern Maine Coastal Current is believed to carry the juvenile lobster into the bay, perhaps from as far away as breeding areas off Grand Manan Island or Nova Scotia.

“They’re at the mercy of the currents,” Hayden said. “Where are they hatching? That’s the $64,000 question,” Hayden said.

Penobscot Bay, through its series of currents and varying water temperatures and salinity, may block the juvenile lobster until they are of the age to settle to the bottom.

“We think it’s a trap,” she said of the bay.

Neal Pettigrew, project scientist, posed another hypothesis.

“One thought is that they just kind of ‘rain out’ when they hit good conditions,” he said.

The ultimate goal of the work is to build a model to help them predict future lobster catches.

The Pen Bay Collaborative is a national pilot project. When the federal funding expires next year, some of the monitoring equipment will continue in use, but will be spread around the entire Gulf of Maine.