The decline and hopeful resurgence of Southern California’s abalone population

Billy Meistrell remembers plucking abalone like apples off a tree as a kid from the rocky intertidal zones along Palos Verdes Peninsula and Catalina Island, shucking them on the swing step of his family’s boat and slicing the meat into thin strips for his mother to batter and deep-fry.

“It was the best thing ever. We used to collect so many it seemed like they would never end,” said Meistrell, vice president of Body Glove. His Redondo Beach office holds an extensive, decades-old abalone shell collection. “I don’t think we ever thought” they would die out.

“From the outside they’re kind of a gnarly, barnacle-looking bump and you’d find three or four of them on a rock,” Meistrell said. “But I haven’t had abalone since the early ’70s.”

Heavy commercial and recreational fishing, urban runoff, pollution and periods of warmer waters colluded to decimate nearly all abalone species off Southern California by the 1970s. In 2001, white abalone — the most tender of the local species and an animal found only in Southern California and Mexico — was the first invertebrate placed on the federal Endangered Species List. Black abalone joined in 2009. Reds, greens and pinks are considered “species of concern.”

Fishery managers were largely caught off guard by the rapid decline of the once-plentiful native animals. But, having missed the boat on saving Southern California’s wild abalone, federal and state governments are working with regional conservation groups and research institutions to bring the sea snails back to life.

“It’s an economic, political, conservation, research and a cultural issue,” said Tom Ford, executive director of the Bay Foundation, who is working to repopulate them off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. “It was a service the bay provided. We don’t want to forget about abalone. We don’t have any abalone fishermen left. But it used to be a big player here and it can be again.

“This isn’t just a conservation effort, but also to put an economy and industry back together. That’s going to take decades.”

CAPTIVE ABALONE BREEDING

Mike Schaadt, director of Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro, said he remembers fishing lobster off the coast with black abalone — a once-plentiful resource.

“I remember cargo nets full of abalone brought in by divers,” Schaadt said. “When we were fishing, we popped them off rocks by the dozen and would bring them back to the boat to bait our lobster traps. There were greens, pinks, reds, whites. White abalone commanded a better price.

“By the time we had enough information (about maintaining a thriving abalone fishery), it was too late.”

Now, he’s hoping the aquarium’s participation in a regional white abalone recovery project aimed at reintroducing the various species to the wild will help revive the invertebrates. A few dozen juvenile white abalone grown in the aquarium’s aquatic nursery are doing well there and are on display.

Bringing the sea snails back to life has proven challenging, but scientists and aquaculturists have learned how to spawn and grow them in captivity, and they are trying to thoroughly understand how they reproduce and thrive in the wild.

A regional partnership between federal and state regulators, research institutions and conservation groups informed by aquaculture farmers is studying the abalone’s favorite foods, the atmospheres that turn them on and put them in the mood to spawn, and their preferred ocean environments. They hope to reintroduce some species along the Palos Verdes Peninsula coastline within five years.

But they have to work out a lot of data gaps before they can know where and when to plant lab-grown abalone so they will survive. Shellfish are notoriously sensitive to any deviation from their natural environment, and 99 percent of fertilized abalone eggs die in their first three months of life.

Despite the species’ fussy nature, researchers across the state have gotten exponentially better at precisely spawning and growing juvenile abalone in captivity in recent years, exceeding their own expectations and fast-forwarding the time line for reintroducing large numbers of abalone into the ocean.

More than 15,000 juvenile abalone — many of them spawned at Aquarium of the Pacific and Cabrillo Marine Aquarium — are living in tanks at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, awaiting “outplanting” into the ocean.

The Bodega Bay facility has been the hub abalone nursery since 2011 because an earlier attempt to grow adult abalone at an Oxnard facility failed when a pathogen got into the tanks. Only one abalone survived from the Oxnard research, so most of the juveniles in captivity are genetically related to that animal. The lab is currently focusing on diversifying the genetics of its white abalone. Other researchers are monitoring wild abalone populations to learn their behaviors and recruit new captive breeding pairs.

Bodega Bay has the advantages of access to cold ocean water and a research laboratory that can carefully control their water quality, said Melissa Neuman, abalone recovery coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service. NMFS provides the lion’s share of funding for abalone restoration work.

“This is going to be a numbers game,” Neuman said. “We need to get to a point where we can mass-produce white abalone, putting hundreds of thousands of them back into the ocean. It’s going to take many years. We know we’re going to lose a lot of animals we put out there.”

Local aquariums and universities that host annual spawning events have been sending their best candidates in the past five years to Bodega Bay. There, animals are held in specially engineered tanks that are fixed with lights that mimic the rising and setting of the sun precisely on Los Angeles time, said Kristin Aquilino, manager of the White Abalone Captive Breeding Program.

Their gonad development is carefully noted to ensure they will provide the most number of eggs and sperm during spawning. However, the scientists know they’re doing something wrong because the female sea snails are only producing 300,000 to 600,000 eggs per spawning — normally, they shoot out 3 million to 6 million eggs per season.

“To get them to spawn, we do something incredibly romantic — put them each in their own bucket with a little hydrogen peroxide,” Aquilino said. “They tend to give us all the gametes they have so there must be some important environmental cue we’re missing.”

Abalone are broadcast spawners and rely on males to be very close to females when they release their white clouds of eggs and sperm. The gametes fuse as they come into contact floating in the ocean. However, only a handful of the millions of gametes released by each breeding pair survive and grow to be juveniles.

“It’s very challenging,” said Sandy Trautwein, Aquarium of the Pacific’s curator of fish and invertebrates. “After five years of attempted unsuccessful spawning, the aquarium has contributed thousands of baby white abalone to Bodega Bay. We’re head-starting them to grow them up for eventual replanting.”

The Long Beach facility also works hand in hand with Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro on this research. Both aquariums supply Bodega Bay. In May, Aquilino worked with the Long Beach and San Pedro aquariums to spawn white abalone.

“We’re lucky if we can get 1,000 to settle on a pipe and start eating and growing,” said Kiersten Darrow, who manages the aquarium’s abalone nursery. “We need tons of animals to just make it past that early stage of that abalone’s life. They not only need to sit and grow, they also need to thrive. We’re all talking about the quality of the kelp. They need a good diet to produce young.”

PALOS VERDES PENINSULA PLANTING

Unlike most local abalone species, whites don’t live near shore or rely on kelp. They’re found in chillier waters 80 to 100 feet deep, where they dine on red algae.

The state Department of Fish and Wildlife is using protected underwater tanks to hold small amounts of white abalone while they monitor their success and research their favorite environments.

“We’ve been really learning how to get animals to reproduce in the wild,” Neuman said. “We’re at a point that, in the next five years or so, we’ll be able to do outplanting. Right now, we’re working on continuing our spawning success and infusing genetic diversity for longer-term survival of the captive population.”

In the meantime, researchers at Southern California Marine Institute on Terminal Island are working with red and green abalone, learning how to best reintroduce them to the Peninsula coastline. SCMI is a research lab for a consortium of universities and conservation groups not far from the Japanese Fishing Village Memorial in Los Angeles Harbor.

The Los Angeles Conservation Corps’ SEA Lab in Redondo Beach spawns green abalone to be raised at SCMI aside red abalone, which are common enough in Northern California to be legally fished.

The Bay Foundation is helping the effort by restoring the kelp forest off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The region, like much of the Santa Monica Bay, is plagued by urchin barrens — vast sections of the ocean floor decimated of native ecosystems and eaten bare by hoards of poorly nourished sea urchins. To regrow kelp forests, fishermen and volunteer divers with the Bay Foundation are killing urchin along the coast by the tens of thousands.

Kelp restoration off the Palos Verdes Peninsula is funded by a legal settlement with Montrose Chemical Corp. and other polluters that dumped tons of the pesticide DDT onto the Palos Verdes Shelf until the 1970s.

“Palos Verdes is definitely a hot spot for abalone,” Neuman said. “It’s very, very tough to learn how to save an endangered species because so few are left. Pinto, pink, red and green abalone act as a surrogate species for helping to inform white abalone restoration.”

Inside SCMI’s lab, rows of open-air tanks hold red and green abalone that are separated by age. Microscopic larvae must be suspended in water and fed algae for their first five days of life. Then they’re moved to tanks where they can settle on rocks and eventually munch fresh kelp. They’re tended to by a full-time staff.

Tom Ford, of the Bay Foundation, said they’ve recently begun planting red and green abalone off the coast and, despite little success with the first crop, have already seen some hopeful signs of settled, thriving abalone with the help of researchers and aquaculture farmers.

“We’re building the infrastructure to increase white abalone numbers for active restoration,” Ford said. “We’re just getting started.”

By Sandy Mazza, Daily Breeze