These sea creatures are on quite the California adventure.
The baby white abalone started their lives in the UC Davis Bodega Marine Lab in Northern California. This week they boarded a private plane for a trip south, where they’ll vacation in labs and aquariums, eating buffets of kelp and hanging out to grow just a bit more.
Later, once they are nice and plump they will be put out into the ocean at a super secret hideaway off the South Bay, where they can, hopefully, live happily ever after – growing and thriving and one day creating babies of their own to help the struggling species rebound.
“We worry about poaching, they are desirable,” said Heather Burdick, director of marine operations at The Bay Foundation’s satellite lab in San Pedro. “We just rather not have people know where they are and give them the best chance.”
The latest delivery this week of lab-grown abs, as they are casually called, is a collaboration with The Bay Foundation, the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach and NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego.
An estimated 11,000 baby abalone, a federal endangered species, were delivered by plane on Wednesday, Feb. 24, to airports in Torrance and San Diego, adding to about 900 delivered the previous Friday, and are now settling into their temporary new homes to grow.
It’s not the first delivery of abalone received locally for the project. In 2019, there were an estimated 1,650 brought down from Bodega Marine Lab, marking the first-ever attempt to release the federally protected species into the wild.
Last year, another 562 were brought down, but the coronavirus pandemic made it challenging to transport more of the specimens.
Typically, a duo would drive the 10 hours up the coast to get the abalone and bring the babies back down south.
“We usually do that in pairs – but now it’s not safe to drive in pairs,” said Burdick.
That’s when LightHawk, an international nonprofit that pairs pilots with environmental causes, asked if any of their volunteers were up for delivering the abalone by air, an estimated three-hour flight.
“The pilots are super dedicated to conservation efforts, they donate their time and planes,” Burdick said. “It’s just really cool to meet these guys and women who are willing to donate their services and help with conservation efforts.”
About 4,000 of the latest batch of abalone were taken to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. The rest continued by air to San Diego.
Danny Muñoz, assistant curator at the Aquarium of the Pacific, was excited about the new juveniles the facility would be hosting.
“It’s always fun to see them when they are that tiny,” he said. “The exciting part for me is that these animals will hopefully be the ones put out in the wild and in a couple of years, these will be the ones back out in the ocean reproducing and keeping the species going.”
The abalone are now about the size of a dime, they will grow to about the size of a quarter while at the aquarium.
They are joining about 100 already there eating and growing before their final transport to the sea.
“These will be behind the scenes for most of their time here,” Muñoz said. “We’re just going to grow them up and get them nicely big and beefy.”
The abalone will be tagged and assigned to their mesh SAFE, or Short-Term Abalone Fixed Enclosure, cages, where about 50 abalone can acclimate.
Then, in four weeks, the cage doors are opened so they can crawl out.
On a recent check of the ones put out into the ocean in 2019, only a few were visible, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t survive.
“They go down into the crevices, they are going to hide away from predators. We don’t expect to see them come out for one to two years,” Burdick said. “Hopefully, in a few years, we’ll see them emerging.”
Moving the 2020 spawn to Southern California makes room for the next crop, the 2021 spawn, which will be brought down south to be outplanted next year – a conveyer-belt system keeping a constant flow of new abalone to be placed in the Pacific Ocean.
“It’s super fun and it’s a great group of organizations we work with,” Burdick said. “There’s about 15 different groups we’re all coordinating with, from the captive breeding programs to aquariums that raise them, and The Bay Foundation that does the restoration out in the ocean.”
There’s also been an ongoing effort in Orange County to get another abalone species revived by nonprofit Get Inspired, which hopes to grow 100,000 green abalone off the coast in 10 years with its Green Abalone Restoration Project.
That effort also partners with local marine education centers like the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, as well as classrooms, to grow the babies before outplanting them. Get Inspired also, for the past few years, has held “ab feeds” where people can taste farm-grown abalone, reminisce about when they were plentiful along the coast and educate the next generation about their importance in the ecosystem.
Abalones, there are seven species found off California’s coast, were once a popular sight found just offshore, until a number of environmental and human impacts nearly wiped out the shellfish.
Culturally, they’ve been used for thousands of years by Native Americans in jewelry and ceremonies and were even a form of currency.
They were a familiar ingredient for Chinese and Japanese immigrants who came to California in the 1920s, because they also grows off the coasts of Asia.
Around the same time, a Monterey restaurant run by “Pop” Ernest Doelter, dubbed the “Abalone King,” was making the abalone more widely popular and soon the masses began devouring the shellfish, spawning the commercial abalone diving industry.
During World War II, abalone were canned and sent to soldiers. At local fish markets dotting the coast, abalone sandwiches were a popular menu item.
The shells, which reflect a rainbow of shiny color, were commonly used as soap dishes and home décor a few decades ago.
But by the ’70s, there was a huge, noticeable decline in the population from over-fishing, causing prices to go up.
In the ’80s, the sabellid polychaete wreaked more havoc among the population after it was introduced to California’s abalone farms from South Africa, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The worms, which live in tubes within the abalone shell, cause severe shell deformities making them prone to breakage and resulting in slow growth.
At the same time, a withering syndrome severely impacted the wild abalone population – the disease causes the foot muscle to shrink in all seven California species.
At the same time, environmental causes were affecting kelp, the abalone’s food source, and many of the remaining abalone starved as the kelp beds disappeared.
By the 1990s, catching abalone was banned in Southern California and governmental protections were put into place to save what was left of the species.
Ecologically, they are important to the kelp forests, which can be overrun by purple sea urchins, direct competitors of abalone, Burdick said. Abundant abalone leave less room for urchins. Although they also eat the kelp, abalone don’t attack the root systems the way urchins do, Burdick said.
The hope for the long run is the population will rebound to what it once was off the coast – maybe even enough so people can again put them on their dinner tables.
“You always hear the stories of people who grew up in California, the abalone were everywhere. They remember cooking and eating abalone and it was a normal thing,” Muñoz said. “Of course, we’re not there anymore. It would be great to get back to that point.”
