A PIONEERING effort to ensure fishermen a future is giving thousands of lobsters a new chance of life - by returning them to the sea.

Live egg-bearing females are escaping the pot by being taken out to sea and released back into their natural habitat.

Any fishermen who later catch them and fail to put them back into the water, will face fines of up to £5,000, as well as the confiscation of their equipment.

Each of the returned crustaceans is marked with a V-notch on one of its tail flaps to show it is part of the scheme.

The notches can take up to three years to disappear - and only then can the creature be legally landed and sold for the table.

Yesterday, officials from the North Eastern Sea Fisheries Committee sailed from Whitby, North Yorkshire, for the first of 2001's lobster drops.

This year they plan to return some 2,460 egg-bearing - known as berried - females, taking the four-year total for the project to 10,000.

Given that it takes between five and seven years to develop a lobster from an egg to a catchable specimen, it will be two or three years yet before the success of the scheme can begin to be gauged with any degree of accuracy.

But even the most conservative "guesstimate" suggests that the 10,000 could increase lobster stocks in the fishery by 100,000.

With backing from Europe, Yorkshire Forward and other agencies, the "mark and release" scheme is the first fully-funded effort of its kind, although similar schemes are being tried off the west of Scotland, the south of Ireland and the coast of Maine in the US.

Improving stocks has become necessary with the decline of the cod fisheries and more vessels putting out pots as they turn to shellfish - and the committee is actively seeking funds to continue the four-year scheme.

"Since we started returning the female lobsters in 1998 we have had four or five successful prosecutions of fishermen who have not returned V-notched specimens to the sea," said deputy chief fishery officer David McCandless, who helped to releases some of the lobsters, yesterday.

"But on the whole fishermen are very satisfied with the scheme and the idea behind it. It is their future it's about after all.