BEALS ISLAND – Using plastic milk jugs and nylon window screening, a University of Maine-Machias professor is seeking a better way to raise lobsters in a confined environment.

Brian Beal, a marine ecology professor who grew up lobstering and clamming in this eastern Maine town, in late August put penny-sized lobsters in gallon and half-gallon containers, placed screening over the openings and tossed them overboard. In all, he submerged 400 containers attached to 20 lines.

Early next summer, Beal will retrieve the jugs and see how many lobsters have survived and how much they’ve grown.

It’s all part of Beal’s ongoing research to find a better way to raise juvenile lobsters in a hatchery. In case the wild population of lobsters should plunge – as it did in 2000 in New York’s Long Island Sound – the idea is that the hatchery-raised specimens could help replenish the wild stocks.

Lobster, after all, is the king of Maine seafood. Lobstermen in 2004 harvested 66.4 million pounds valued at $267.6 million.

If the lobster population took a hit, it could devastate Maine’s coastal communities, especially in Washington County where the groundfish industry has vanished, Beal said.

“You can look at this as Plan B,” he said of his research. “You hope you never need a lobster hatchery, but what if you do?”

The earliest American hatchery was established in 1883 in Woods Hole, Mass., where eggs were detached from females and placed in jars.

Beal, 47, has worked on raising lobsters for nearly two decades. Researchers, he said, have mastered the art of raising juveniles in land-based hatcheries to the size of a penny.

The problem is that raising them to a larger size on land is not economically feasible.

Moreover, nobody knows how many juvenile lobsters survive to become legal-sized adults when they are set free in the ocean. Without that knowledge, he said, it’s impossible to calculate whether a hatchery would ever make economic sense.

The only feasible way to find out, he said, is to tag the juvenile lobsters, which is only possible when they are about 5 inches long.

So Beal’s mission these days is to find a way to grow the penny-sized lobsters into cellular-phone-sized lobsters in a contained environment in the ocean. If that works, then the lobsters can be tagged when set out in the wild.

Elmer Beal, a 77-year-old lobsterman from Beals Island, was a skeptic a year ago when he helped Brian Beal toss over plastic juice bottles with juvenile lobsters in them. He became convinced of the project’s value in July when he saw that 90 percent of the lobsters survived.

Elmer Beal, who’s not related to Brian Beal, said a lobster hatchery could someday help the industry, but many fishermen dismiss it.

“It could do the fishermen a lot of good, if it wasn’t talked down,” he said.

In the last week of August, Brian Beal tossed his milk jugs into the ocean. As Beal, his 11-year-old son Caleb and University of Maine-Machias student Teri Dane worked the containers, Elmer Beal tended to the helm and chatted with other lobstermen on his marine radio.

Over the airwaves came the voice of Ordman Alley, a Beals Island fisherman who joked that the Beals were wasting their time.

“We got a natural aquarium here. The fishermen are taking care of it,” Alley said. “I don’t think we need help.”

Elmer Beal shot back: “What are you going to say when there are a thousand lobsters crawling around here?”

Meanwhile, Brian Beal focused on getting his milk containers in the water without tangling up the lines.

Skeptics don’t bother him. The day will come, he said, when he determines if lobster hatcheries are worth the time and money.

“The moment we find out it’s not worth doing, we’ll put it away,” he said.