There are concerns that poor water quality may be having an affect on the health of post-capture rock lobsters. This project addresses this in three ways:

1. Determining the optimal level of ammonia in holding and transport systems. This will contribute to the understanding of optimal system design.

2. Understanding the mechanism of ammonia toxicity. This will enable industry to develop methods to counteract the harmful effects.

3. Providing information to the rock lobster industry in the appropriate form to ensure uptake of the results of research on optimising water quality, specifically in the area of oxygen and ammonia.

Enhancement offers a mechanism to increase production of rock lobsters, both by increasing production from coastal reef and by providing a mechanism for biologically neutrality in the harvest of puerulus (and thus overcomes a barrier to ongrowing). Additional benefits include the ability to increase biomass and egg production in regions considered depleted, which enhances resource sustainability.

While the potential benefits of enhancement are broad, the value of the concept is critically affected by the survival of juveniles after release. Low survival would reduce the economic benefit and also nullify assumptions on the biologically neutrality of the harvest of puerulus.

The proposed project addresses the need for information on how to release juveniles (or condition juveniles prior to release) so that survival is optimised. Future release efforts will be assisted by information on habitat choice, so that return from enhancement is maximised, in terms of animals surviving through to harvest size. Large scale experiments tracking the cohorts of released juveniles will evaluate enhancement on a pilot-scale - patterns apparent in small scale experiments may not hold true in larger releases so larger scale experimental releases are considered vital.