FRANKLIN (AP) – A 70-pound halibut that lives in a 3,000-gallon water tank is giving hope that groundfish aquaculture might have a future in Maine.

The big, powerful and, to be frank, ugly fish is being grown at the University of Maine’s Center for Aquaculture Research.

“It’s not pretty,” said Nick Brown, a researcher at the center, “but this is a very valuable animal.”

The possibility of growing halibut in tanks on land is drawing the interest of businessmen Alan Spear and Doug Morrell. Intrigued by Brown’s research, Spear and Morrell have created a company called Maine Halibut Farms in hopes of having a land-based tank farm to grow Atlantic halibut.

“By next fall, we’ll be selling several thousand fish,” Spear said.

A wild halibut fishery now thrives in the north Pacific, but the fish is not commercially viable in the Atlantic. The population crashed during the heyday of 19th-century fishing, and although it has made gains from time to time, it has never recovered its commercial importance.

Halibut are the Atlantic’s largest flatfish, with two crossed-looking eyes atop their heads, and sideways mouths that can ingest a whole squid.

They are also popular eating fish. But the supply isn’t always available on the East coast.

Spear and Morrell hope to change that.

They are working with Brown in hopes of fine-tuning the fish-rearing techniques to grow out halibut to market size. They are also researching sites along the Maine coast to locate a commercial facility that they hope to build within the next five years.

They say a halibut aquaculture industry has emerged in Europe over the past two decades. Companies in Canada, Iceland, Scotland and Norway produced nearly 2 million pounds of the fish in 2002, according to industry statistics.

“We’re the first to be doing this in the U.S., but we’re not the first in the world,” Spear said.

But there are plenty of obstacles. Although Brown has fish at all stages of development at the University of Maine’s aquaculture center in Franklin – a place where university and commercial resources come together to develop new businesses for the state – he has yet to raise a halibut from egg to adulthood.

Only 80 percent of eggs are successfully fertilized, and only 75 percent of those hatch. From there, every stage of this fish’s complex development means further loss. Overall, a 6 percent survival rate is spectacular.

“You need millions of eggs to get tens of thousands of fish,” Brown said. “But once they get to 5 grams, they’re bulletproof.”

With no wild halibut fishery, there is little opposition to the project. Some argue that this sort of groundfish aquaculture might take pressure off beleaguered wild populations. Others cite the economic benefits of a new species and believe that any conflicts with wild fisheries will be decided by the market.

“I like to think that there’s room for both, that these things work themselves out in a free market system,” said Paul Anderson, director of Maine Sea Grant at the University of Maine and chairman of the now-defunct governor’s Task Force on Marine Aquaculture.