An adult Red Abalone.
The Rumsien, Quiroste, and other coastal Indian groups ate abalone, and used the shells as tools and decoration. The name “abalone” was suggested by the shape of the shell, it comes from the old Spanish word for “ear"
Russian and English trappers came in the 18th and 19th centuries and turned the Abalone’s chief predator into otterskin hats. By the early 1900’s Sea Otters were thought to be extinct. The Abalone population probably boomed (nobody knows how many abalone there were before the Sea Otters were hunted). In 1898 Gennosuke Kodani came to Point Lobos and started a business diving for Abalone, and exporting them to Japan, where they were considered a delicacy. Americans at the time generally thought they were disgusting.
Within two years there were cries that foreigners might be “exterminating” a “valuable and delicious” resource. Given the abundant abalone population (at that time) and Americans’ recent attitude about the big mollusks, these statements can only be interpreted as xenophobic or racist. By 1915 the State of California passed laws banning all abalone exports, and Kodani was put out of business.
Almost. “Pop” Ernest Doelter came along and turned Abalone into an American delicacy. The old granite quarry cut in the side of Whaler’s Cove, that had held a whale rendering operation in the 1870s, now became home to an Abalone cannery. Japanese divers continued to work into the 1930s, and locals began “rock picking” abalone at low tide. In the years before WWII, people noticed the visible abalone disappearing and pointed fingers, once again, at the Japanese. But abalone don’t travel far: the abs the divers were taking were underwater. The disappearance of intertidal abalone was due to the taking of intertidal abalone, by locals. Commercial abalone diving continued after the war, and as skin and scuba diving became popular, a sport abalone fishery arose.
The (re)discovery of abalone as a food put tremendous pressure on their population. One Japanese diver and his surface support team could land 2000 in a day! As the rocks around Point Lobos were fished out the divers moved farther south. But divers in that era were restricted by their equipment to shallow water. There was still plenty of breeding stock below their reach. As the sea otters made their return to the region (a small band of survivors was discovered along the isolated Big Sur Coast in 1938 and quickly protected) they resumed their natural diet, and that included abalone. By the 1970s adult abalone at any depth were an infrequent site. But a small breeding populations stills survives, tucked deep in to rocky crevices out of the reach of man and otter alike.
Today a deadly disease threatens to make abalone regionally extinct. It is called “withering syndrome” and its caused by a bacteria. The bacteria have been hampered in the past by the area’s typically chilly water. But ocean temperatures around Monterey Bay have been rising slowly and steadily for at least 70 years, and warm pulses in El Nino years help the deadly bacteria further. Abalone farmers have probably added to its spread by unwittingly planting infected young abalone in growth beds to the north. Commercial Abalone fishing has been completely suspended by the California Department of Fish and Game, and sport fishing is under new licensing restrictions. The fate of California’s Abalone remains to be seen.
Photo No. 063U28 ©1987 Marc Shargel
Photographed at San Miguel Island
