24 http://www.earthislandjournal.org
concerned about the abalone’s plight in California, and
have persistently voiced their need to be heard alongside
other groups working on abalone declines. “Discussion should
always begin with people indigenous to the land, wherever
you are,” Renick asserts. “You’re talking about our habitat
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our foods, our plants, our medicines, our homelands, our
aboriginal ties to the landscape.”
Silva acknowledges that there is no hard-and-fast answer,
no one solution that traditional ecological knowledge —
whether from the Pomo people or any other Native tribe —
will provide as abalone populations continue to decline. But
deliberate and progressive co-management between tribes
and other groups involved in abalone recovery would only
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B
ODEGA MARINE LABORATORY sits on a foggy, heath-
colored headland a mile or so outside the sea-worn vil-
lage of Bodega Bay, just about an hour-and-a-half drive north
of San Francisco. On a damp July afternoon, with droplets of
marine layer in my hair and the tang of fresh-caught crab
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University of California, Davis and senior environmental sci-
entist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, has
built her life around abalone. She is perhaps more involved
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Rogers-Bennett tells me she is raising critically
endangered white abalone. The most recent population
models estimate that only 3,600 white abalone remain in the
wild — just 1 percent of what their population was 20 years
ago. With a natural mortality rate of 12 percent each year,
the entire species will almost certainly reach quasi-extinction
if outplanting is not implemented within the next few years.
“The only thing we can do with this species is captive rearing
and putting them out there,” she says. Rogers-Bennett is more
prepared than anyone to do so — there are over 50 times
more white abalone in her lab than there are left in the ocean.
In the meantime, the team at Bodega Marine Laboratory
has been outplanting red abalone as a proxy for whites, rees-
tablishing wild red populations where possible, and along the
way learning what techniques might be applicable to white
abalone outplanting in the future.
Yet, white abalone recovery only makes up about 40 per-
cent of the work Rogers-Bennett and her team do. The rest,
she notes enthusiastically, focuses on urchin management,
kelp recovery, and restoration possibilities for the other imper-
iled abalone species of the California coast. Abalone cannot
recover just through outplanting; if whites or any species of
abalone are to make a comeback, we must concurrently work
toward restoring the entire coastal kelp forest ecosystem,
Rogers-Bennett explains. She, along with Dayton and many
others involved in abalone recovery, consider the establish-
ment and enforcement of Marine Protected Areas one of
the best ways to do this. There are currently more than 120
Marine Protected Areas covering some 850 square miles of
California’s coastal and ocean habitat. Many of these — like
the San Diego-Scripps Coastal State Marine Conservation
Area and the much larger Richardson Rock State Marine
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safe havens and ecological recovery zones for abalone, kelp,
and myriad ocean life.
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tions around abalone, Rogers-Bennett says. Given the mora-
torium on harvesting, we have the rare chance to adjust how
people view these animals, a chance to teach new generations
to see abalone less as a commodity and appreciate them as
fellow beings, organisms that must be treated with respect
and care especially when we choose to interact with them
consumptively.
The Ocean Institute in Dana Point, which receives around
100,000 visitors each year, half of which are young students
enrolled in marine-related school programs, is doing just that.
Students learn and contribute to ocean research through
activities such as dissecting squid, identifying animals in tidal
pools, and exploring the ocean on a traditional sailing brig to
count marine mammals. The institute has now taken steps to
incorporate abalone into their programs, too, including the
one which grazes slowly around a tank at the entrance, greet-
ing children and adult visitors alike. It often pauses to rest
right up against the glass of the tank, photogenically posed on
the rim of another, long-passed, abalone’s shell.T
HIS PA S T AUTUMN, I was given a boxful of abalone
shells to use as models for some natural history
illustrations I’m working on. One, found many years ago
half-buried along a beach in Cambria, a small seaside town
on the central California coast, came from a red abalone;
it’s almost the size of a dinner plate. I pick this shell up in
my left hand, the same hand that remembers how it felt to
hold, and be held by, a living abalone. Its outer surface is
coarse, pocked with four open respiratory holes and ridged
by countless, intricate calcium carbonate accretions. Pink
and green concentric growth lines, each one matching the
color of algae the animal had been eating at the time, ripple
across the shell’s surface like rings on a tree trunk. Old