It sounds like a science fiction movie: scientist raises sandworms; sandworms turn against him and overpower him; worms mutate and grow beyond proportions ever imagined; worms escape from the hatchery …

But no, no. Peter Cowin is very much in control at Seabait, Ltd., a thriving company that produced 50 tons of sandworms in 2002. He and Peter Olive started the company in England in 1985, and now, Cowin is developing a subsidiary company, Seabait Maine, LLC., by starting out at the University of Maine’s Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research (CCAR) in Franklin.

Cowin will be the first occupant of a new 72- by 160-foot building funded by a Maine Technology Institute (MTI) Cluster Enhancement Award to CCAR to support the aquaculture and marine biotech industry. Cowin’s operation, the first project to raise seaworms in the United States, will remain in the building for two years while he works through technical challenges of relocating to a facility different from the one that is used in England. The company is investing $1.2 million in the initial stages of the move.

At age five, Peter Cowin tried to establish a business selling garden worms to neighborhood fishermen. The venture didn’t exactly take off, but when he was eleven, a second attempt, selling night crawlers, fared better, with earnings of about $20 a week.

Three years later his family moved to England, and as a teenager, he abandoned worms for other activities. But when he entered the University of Newcastle he pursued studies in marine biology, and, true to his early predilection, chose to do research on Nereis virens, sandworms, for his senior thesis, under the tutelage of Professor Olive. The college, he says, had several faculty experts on marine worms. Cowin continued with postgraduate work on worm culture, but he started Seabait before he completed his thesis.

When Cowin and Olive formed Seabait, Ltd., an idea he says “raised a smile on many faces,” they were the first to tackle the process of transferring laboratory techniques for raising sandworms to a commercial operation. Initially the going was rocky, with the entire crop dying twice when fluctuations in water temperature over-stressed the worms. However, he says, shareholders stuck by them, and the company got on its feet. They produced one and one-half tons of worms in the first good year, 99 percent for the live angler market. Production has grown to more than 50 times the output of the early days.

In 2002, about 50 percent of the worms were sold live to the angler market and 50 percent were frozen to serve as a maturation diet for aquacultured shrimp and to feed fish hatchery broodstock, such as Dover sole, sea bass, cod, haddock and sea bream. The worms, Cowin says, are valued as shrimp diet and broodstock feed because they contain twice the lipid content of worms collected from the wild and increase the fecundity of broodstock and the viability of juveniles. Cultured worms are also “biosecure,” meaning they are free of heavy metals or harmful organisms. Frozen worms are shipped to about 20 countries in Latin America, the Far East and Europe.

Cowin says he has always yearned to resettle in the United States – he, his wife and four sons are relocating here permanently – but had to wait until several factors came together to make it possible to bring his expertise in raising sandworms here and form a commercial operation.

Developing blast freezing techniques was the first breakthrough because they provided a way to spread worm sales over the entire year. No longer would tanks lie fallow part of the year as they had when almost all of the worms were sold to the seasonal live bait market.

“This step,” says Cowin, “coincided with our learning to produce many more juvenile worms at any time of year.” He explains that the juveniles, which are suitable for the hatchery feed market, can be grown in three months, whereas the bait market requires larger worms which take about six months to grow on the farm (18 months to 2 years in the wild). “This totally changed how we run the farm and market the worms,” he says. “We continued producing worms for the bait market season, which is biggest in summer and fall, but were able to turn over other tanks four times a year to produce feed worms and ship them during all seasons.”

In 1998, Seabait exported one percent of its product; in 1999, 14 percent; and by 2001, more than 50 percent. During this time, Cowin says, re-circulation technology improved, making it possible for him to locate in Maine’s climate, which would be too cold in winter and too hot in summer to grow worms outdoors, as he does in England, where the tanks are located next to a power plant and utilize warm water generated by the plant.

In the late 1990s, Nick Brown, manager at CCAR, contacted Seabait about using their worms as feed for the halibut broodstock used in halibut aquaculture research at CCAR. When Cowin mentioned he was searching for a suitable location to open a Seabait facility in the U.S., Brown suggested he start out at the center, which was established to support new aquaculture projects in Maine. Cowin applied for and received two matching seed grants from MTI to help fund research on the project, and subsequently, was awarded a $485,000 development loan for the demonstration project. The loan will be paid back within two years of commercialization. “The combination of infrastructure, local knowledge and research expertise at University of Maine and funding from MTI was perfect for us,” Cowin says. “I couldn’t believe our luck.”

Presently, Cowin’s operation is spread out in different areas of the CCAR facility. Some broodstock worms (taken from native stock, which, Cowin says, has the same DNA as sandworms in England) reside temporarily in a large plastic garbage can in one temperature-controlled area. Plump females carrying 250,000 eggs each are in the same room in colorful plastic cups; nursery worms live in small tanks nearby, and worms in various stages of growout are in fish tanks in another building – 300,000 worms five millimeters long in one tank, 100,000 larger ones in another. All should be able to move into the new building in May.

Cowin feeds the larger worms a pellet feed composed of predominantly vegetable matter with a small portion of fish oil. “The worms will eat every scrap of organic matter that goes into the tanks,” he says. “If we stood in the tank, they would eat us.”

During the initial two years at the center, Cowin will continue marketing research and raise investment capital to have everything in place when he launches full-scale commercialization at a location in Hancock or Waldo County. He says it will be ten times the size of the demonstration project, a several million dollar investment. He will maintain his relationship with CCAR, continuing research and trials and keeping broodstock at the facility, an arrangement similar to one Seabait Ltd. enjoys at the University of Newcastle.

Cowin explained that among the challenges he faces in adapting Seabait’s U.K. techniques and technology, the changeover to using a re-circulation system is foremost. In Lyndmouth, England, the heated water from the power plant provides a continuous flow through the tanks where worms burrow beneath a layer of sand. Here, two to three million worms will live in sand in two rows of four layers of rectangular tanks, but the water in the tanks will need to be warmed in winter and more important, the building will have to be heated. About 10 percent of the water will need to be replaced each day.

Cowin’s market research in the Northeast over the past few years has made him optimistic about the existing angler market, and the infrastructure that supports that market. He says his research has shown that while demand for fresh worms has risen, particularly since the return of striped bass, the wild worm harvest has declined in numbers and size over the past few years. Also, he says, most of the harvesters in Maine are age 40 and over, and young people are not acquiring licenses. Because of these factors, demand is outstripping the supply, and he does not believe his operation will interfere with the wild worm market. Rather, he thinks that by providing a reliable year-round supply of worms of uniform quality and size, he will help keep the infrastructure for distributing worms in place, thus aiding wild harvesters. “Once that infrastructure is gone, it’s nearly impossible to get it back,” he observes. He is hopeful that he can work cooperatively with wild harvesters and not be seen as a threat. Eventually, he expects Seabait Maine will freeze one-half its production and export it to hatcheries.

Cowin anticipates employing five or six people during the experimental phase at CCAR and increasing to 15 employees when he moves into full commercial production. For further information, visit their website: .