Ms. Gill, the reproduction of lobster is pretty much dependent on what happens to the females. The females are quite sensitive to factors in the environment and are also slower growing and reproduce less often than most other species.
Female lobsters only reproduce every second year, and the other problem is that when they reproduce, they have to attach the eggs to the abdomen, and that means the size of the abdomen is important in how many eggs they produce.
Here we have a female organism that is in a population that can only reproduce every second year, and for most of the lobsters in the fishery—the first 10 years or so that they're there—they can only produce between 8,000 and 32,000 eggs. You can compare that to something like a cod. A mature female cod can put out a million eggs, or a sea scallop can produce up to 10 million eggs, and they both do it annually, rather than every second year.
Females are fragile in terms of their recruitment potential, and they should be carefully protected.