PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • March 2, 2023
At your grocery store fish counter, you can find farmed salmon, farmed shrimp, farmed oysters and farmed mussels. One farmed species you won’t find at your local fishmonger? Lobster. Why not? The short answer, according to marine biologists, aquaculture and industry experts, is twofold: The many challenges of farming lobster make it uneconomical, among them, it takes as much as seven years for a lobster to reach legal harvest size, about a pound, and in the meantime farmed lobsters must be kept separated to preclude their nasty habit of eating one another. Also, the wild-caught fishery is already meeting the demand. It’s cheaper to get a boat and a license and head out to sea.