Towards the end of the 19th Century, the marine fisheries of Aotearoa-New Zealand were mobilized as an important resource in the ongoing construction of the islands as a settler colony. As part of this project, the settler state supported the establishment of a hatchery to raise and proliferate imported marine life of economic value on the Southeast coast near Dunedin. Over several decades, the Portobello Marine Fish Hatchery tried and failed to acclimatize North Atlantic species like lobster, crab herring, and flounder in the seas surrounding New Zealand. In contrast to scholarship which has described acclimatization as a project motivated by nostalgia, this paper argues that the introduction of foreign marine organisms was a deliberate project of colonial replacement which sought to impose an Anglo ecology and economy on the region.