Primary Investigator: Raphael Vanderstichel Co-Primary Investigators: Crawford Revie and Jean Lavallée

The lobster (Homarus americanus) is Canada’s most valuable seafood export, worth more than $1 billion annually, with more than 40 managed fisheries (referred to as lobster fishing areas – LFAs) throughout the Atlantic Provinces and Québec.

Since the early 2000s, there has been a significant increase in the proportion of soft-shelled lobsters caught in Southwest Nova Scotia (SWNS) from, historically, 5-10% to 30-40% in recent years. These soft-shelled lobsters have low meat yield and poor survivability during holding and transportation, which has strong, negative economic consequences for fishers, shippers and processors. The lobster shell hardness is directly related to the timing of their moulting stages; therefore, understanding factors associated with moult timing is vital to the sustainability of the Canadian lobster industry.

Since 2004, the Atlantic Lobster Moult & Quality (ALMQ) monitoring project (www.lobstermoult.ca) has been routinely collecting information on lobster sex, size, hemolymph protein levels, moult stage, and shell hardness from various locations in SWNS, and this large dataset contains various spatial coordinate formats.

We will standardize the spatial coordinate formats, and combine these complex ALMQ data with environmental and geospatial data. The goal is to attract funding from industry and government to use the dataset to create predictive models for lobster moulting patterns in the East Coast of Canada.

Our study objectives are to: 1) Describe and analyze ALMQ data to understand moulting patterns, and; 2) Gather and process additional environmental and geospatial data (spatial coordinates, coastal water temperatures, salinity, and depths) that will lay the foundation to build predictive models to identify factors related to lobster moulting.