Moorings Serve Double-duty as Habitat

by Laurie Schreiber

The habitat mooring had a plush resident in place for delivery to Seal Harbor. Seal Harbor’s “no wake” buoy was attached to the new mooring. The stuffed toy was removed before the block went in the water.  Laurie Schreiber Photo

A new mooring system is designed to provide habitat for adult and juvenile lobsters.

The Habitat Mooring System was invented by Stewart Hardison, the founder of a start-up company called Wind Reef Group, LLC, in Orono.

Hardison obtained the help of Dr. Robert Bayer, executive director of the Lobster Institute at the Unviersity of Maine in Orono; and Dr. Ian Bricknell, a professor of aquaculture biology at the University of Maine in Orono, to develop the design of the system.

“We’ve designed this mooring to be optimized for marine animals such as lobsters and small fish,” said Bricknell. “The idea is that the moorings will be colonized after they go in the water.”

The three men, along with the Lobster Institute’s assistant director, Cathy Billings, met at the Seal Harbor town wharf on July 28 to deploy the first habitat mooring to come off the production line. The prototype mooring was donated to the town of Mount Desert and will be studied over the next three years by UMO scientists for its effectiveness as habitat.

Also on hand for the Seal Harbor gathering was Mount Desert harbormaster Shawn Murphy to accept the donation of the mooring, to be used to secure the town’s “no wake” buoy at the entrance of the harbor. Barge owners Matt Knox and Terry Johnson deployed the habitat mooring and took up the “no wake” buoy’s old granite block.

The first habitat mooring is a smooth concrete block that weighs 4,000 pounds. It is penetrated by tunnels and channels of various diameters.

“Normally, moorings are just smooth blocks of granite or concrete,” said Bricknell. “But with these enhanced habitat structures, we believe these moorings will support two or three adult and juvenile lobsters and, of course, the food animals that they need – small crabs, crustaceans, mollusks like mussels and small oysters.”

A graduate student from UMO will begin to study the effectiveness of the concept when he dives down to the mooring in a month or so, said Bricknell. The information collected over the next three years, he said, will inform the enhancement of future structures.

“The potential of these structures to be a standard mooring type is huge,” he said. “Looking around the harbor here, I can see several hundred buoys which are really just blocks of granite or blocks of concrete. And they work very well. But they don’t provide anything to the habitat. They probably remove something from the habitat, because they sit on the sediment and what was there is unavailable to animals.”

Research shows that about 15 percent of lobsters don’t have a home, which is usually a burrow, Bricknell said. These lobsters are vulnerable to predation and have less breeding success, he said. The new habitat mooring can potentially help with that situation, thus boosting the breeding population, he said.

The structures are potentially useful for other sea creatures and marine industries as well, Bricknell said. The structure, he said, has drawn interest from Maine’s aquaculture industry as a vehicle that could potentially enhance biodiversity around fish and shellfish farms.

The structure also has potential as a nursery for larval lobsters, he said.

“We can give larval lobsters a boost in life,” he said, “because we can adjust the apertures for tiny lobsters and give them an advantage in life over the first two or three years that they wouldn’t have if they were just put on the ocean floor, where they have to fight for habitat with all the rest of the lobsters out there. So we can put these in, seed them, and we should get much better survival with the seeded lobsters. So there are a lot of advantages to this – and they work quite well as a boat mooring, too.”

The mooring can be modified to suit other types of sea creatures, he said. For example, a more open interior would be best suited to provide a nursery for juvenile urchins. The surface can be textured with, for example, crushed oyster shells, which makes an excellent substrate for juvenile oysters.

Hardison worked for several advertising agencies in New York City for many years before moving to upstate New York to pursue his lifelong interest in nature and the environment. He started a small company that manufactured and marketed bird feeders and garden-related products. A self-taught inventor, Hardison designed, patented and registered a number of bird- and garden-related products, which have been solid through a number of major retailers.

According to literature provided by Hardison, for the past five years, he has closely followed what he sees as “the convergence of three issues of national importance: climate change, energy transformation and food security.” The habitat mooring, the literature says, “speaks to each of these three issue.”

More specifically, he said in Seal Harbor, the buoy mooring is a small-scale version of a larger concept he has in mind for large habitat structures to use in conjunction with offshore wind turbines.

The size of the prototype structure, he said, was based on the advice of Hamilton Marine president Wayne Hamilton.

“It’s a good, general-duty size for inner harbor, Maine waters and harbors,” Hardison said.

The tooling for the 4,000-pound block can be used for structures ranging in size from 2,000 pounds to 6,500 pounds, he said.

“For an inner harbor mooring situation in that range, we hope that this will become an attractive alternative to a standard granite block,” he said. “It’s certainly priced competitively and it provides habitat features.

A portion of the sales of the habitat moorings will go to support the Lobster Institute, a non-profit, non-governmental organization that conducts and facilitates research related to lobsters and the lobster fishery. Some of the institute’s projects include studies of lobster health, impact of toxins and pesticides, the effectiveness of V-notching, the interaction between right whales and lobster gear, fish farm impacts on lobster, and the use of alternative bait.