Abalones were a staple of coastal life for centuries — a nearshore fishery once topped 5.4 million pounds — until they were all but wiped out by disease, overharvest, predatory otters, poaching and habitat destruction.
By 1997, state officials had shut down all abalone fisheries south of San Francisco in hopes of saving the species. Today there’s just one small recreational fishery for free divers harvesting red abalone on the North Coast, along with several commercial operations — including one in Carlsbad — that farm nonprotected varieties for seafood.
While white abalones are on the road to extinction, there’s evidence of successful reproduction in a few black abalone colonies on the Channel Islands in recent years, giving researchers hope that they eventually can be restored in parts of the region. Optimism is fueled by research that suggests some of the remaining “black abs” are resistant to a type of bacteria that nearly wiped them out starting in the 1980s.
The National Marine Fisheries Service recently formed a task force to save the black abalone, which was listed as federally endangered in 2009. A recovery plan is expected in about two years, though scientists said it’s complicated by poaching in the United States, limited harvest enforcement in Mexico and the potential that climate change will speed the spread of disease in the population.
“Ideally, we’d like to see healthy populations in like 75 percent of the historical range and right now, we are seeing limited recovery in possibly two islands,” said John Butler, a NOAA fisheries biologist in La Jolla who sits on the recovery team. “Those small populations are not anywhere close to what the historical abundance was.”
Abalones congregate in bands along the West Coast based on seawater temperature that suit the different types.. Black abs live in the intertidal zone while white abs generally live below 60 feet.
Indians harvested abalone before Europeans arrived in California, and by the mid-1800s Chinese-Americans were catching a few million pounds of green and black abs annually. Later, abalones were targeted by Japanese free divers and eventually by baby boomers who grew up peeling them off rocky outcroppings so that the practice became part of California beach culture. Some have compared their taste to scallops.
“You used to be able to get an abalone sandwich for lunch when I first got here in the early 1970s,” Butler said.
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