The lobsters of Seal Harbor have a new housing opportunity - a 4,000 pound concrete module designed especially for them. It's actually a bouy mooring, which was lowered onto the ocean floor this morning. The mooring was designed and manufactured in Maine as part of an effort to create more habitat for lobsters young and old.

Mount Desert Island's Seal Harbor is dotted with buoys, and beneath each one, about 30 feet underwater, rests a heavy granite or concrete mooring. But one businessman and nature lover wants to change that.

"Our mooring block has habitat features designed into it to attract lobsters and other marine animals," said Stewart Hardison's inventor of the Habitat Mooring System.

Hardison's system is a massive rectangular concrete block that's more than 4 feet long at the base. It contains holes and tunnels of various sizes - it's a veritable "lobster condo."

"This is unit number one in the water. We hope in time that we will be one of the standard moorings," said Hardison. "So in time we hope to have many thousands out there. This and other sizes."

Hardison's business is based in Orono, where he collaborates with researchers at the University of Maine's Lobster Institute and School of Marine Sciences.

"The mooring creates habitat rather than being a featureless block," said Robert Bayer, executive director of the Lobster Institute.

"We know from talking to divers that lobsters will burrow under these featureless blocks but a nursery ground, basically, is what we have," Bayer said. "It's a lobster nursery offering protection and food to lobsters as they are developing from a variety of sizes and it gives them the shelter that they need as they're in a vulnerable stage."

"Research from my colleagues at the School of Marine Sciences have shown that about 15 percent of lobsters don't actually have a burrow or a proper habitat," said Ian Bricknell, a professor of aquaculture biology and the chief scientist working with Hardison.

"Looking at the harbor here, I can easily see a hundred buoys and if these were a hundred habitats each holding two lobsters, and we can hold many more than that in one of these structures, that would increase the population in this area just buy 200 alone," Bricknell said.

The first Habitat Mooring System was donated to Seal Harbor and is used to anchor the town of Mount Desert's bouy sign that advises boaters to go slow, and leave "No Wake." The company plans to enlist the help of divers to monitor the popularity of the habitat. In the meantime, habitats are available for purchase for between $600-$700 dollars and a portion of the proceeds will go to UMaine's Lobster Institute.