The California Fish and Game Commission reduced the annual allowed catch of red abalone from 18 to 12 per person and cut the season by two months during an emergency rule-making session last week. The changes result from low population densities and increasing mortality and starvation among the sea snails along the northern coast—the only area the recreational fishery is open in the state—due to poor environmental conditions.
Sonke Mastrup, the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s environmental program manager for the invertebrate program, painted a bleak picture of the red abalone fishery at last Wednesday’s meeting, in San Diego. “The consequences of failing to halt this decline could be generational,” he said.
Red abalone is the only species of the seven in California that can be harvested recreationally. The mollusk’s population plummeted in the 20th century due to a likely combination of overfishing, disease and warm waters, according to Fish and Wildlife’s website.
The season for red abalone, which people often grill to eat, previously ran from April to November, with a month-long break during July. Next year the season will only run from May to October, including the month-long summer break.
The vast majority of the state’s abalone diving and rock picking—with an estimated 155,000 collected in 2015—happens in Mendocino, but over 700 abalone were taken from Marin’s coast last year. The numbers used to be much higher; back in 2002, before more stringent rules were put in place, total catch on the northern coast was 265,000, with roughly 4,000 taken in Marin.
But it’s a confluence of environmental conditions, not recreational harvesting, that have caused the recent red abalone decline, Mr. Mastrup said. Stocks began to suffer in 2011, he explained, when a harmful algal bloom took a tough toll.
Kelp, a primary food source for red abalone, has also suffered dramatically in recent years: the kelp forest declined 93 percent between 2008 and 2014, in part due to a warm ocean event in 2014 often referred to as “the blob.” Unfortunately, Mr. Mastrup said, 2016 saw only a slight improvement for kelp.
“These conditions have resulted in starvation conditions for this fishery,” he said. Mr. Mastrup added that the department has documented “low gonad conditions,” meaning the abalone are not breeding.
In normal conditions, 99 percent of foraged abalone appear healthy. During a health assessment this year, for which Fish and Wildlife staffers intercepted divers and took pictures to inspect the mollusks, 25 percent appeared in “various stages of starvation.”
Despite the fact that fishing is not the cause of the decline, Mr. Mastrup said strict regulations are necessary. “Unfortunately, too much fishing will only make this problem worse,” he said.
As recently as a decade and a half ago, when limits were first set, people could pick 100 abalone per person per year. The commission has set increasingly stricter limits; in 2013, in response to poor ocean conditions, catch limits were lowered from 24 to 18 and foragers could only take nine of those from the Sonoma-Marin coast.
But population densities—a key number, since abalone need to be in close proximity to shoot eggs or sperm into the water to intermingle for reproduction——have continued to decline.
The dozen-abalone cap coupled with a shorter season, the option that most divers who spoke at the public meeting requested, was the most generous option of the three offered by Fish and Wildlife for the commission’s consideration.
The option that would have fully implemented the department’s Abalone Recovery and Management Plan, which calls for reducing the total catch to about 107,000 for 2017, would have set the cap at nine and shortened the season. The option the department recommended, which purported to balance environmental and fishing interests, called for reducing the cap to nine but keeping April and November open.