January 2002
We will be pursuing a project on an underutilized specie of crab in offshore waters, the Lithodes maja specie, cousin to a king crab on our coast. We will be tying this project into a fishing gear tech class, a shoreline economics class and a fisheries ecology class. We are in the process of designing some traps, getting permits from Maine DMR and setting up some trials with some other boats as well. All these boats, but mainly Mike will set some traps of ours with their strings or separately on known crab bottom. These guys are all offshore lobstering now and avoid these crabs if they can, as usually they don't co-exist with lobsters in our part of the bottom. I will be forwarding a synopsis of how this project is incorporated into our curriculum and what we hope to produce from it soon.  We also are currently constructing some seawater recirculating systems at the school to hold and observe animals in a 1500 gallon tank big enough to put a trap into.

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