His Abalone Give Up Sex to Gain Weight : Aquaculture: A researcher sterilizes the shellfish by creating an extra set of chromosomes.

In a small laboratory next to Southern California Edison’s Ormond Beach generating plant in Oxnard, a marine researcher is trying to make abalone forget about sex and channel their energy toward growing faster.

The lab has produced sexless abalone as part of an experiment being conducted by Tom McCormick of Berkeley and financed by the National Science Foundation.

McCormick, 39, studied aquaculture--the science of raising plants or animals in water--for two years in two of Japan’s largest abalone hatcheries. At the Ormond Beach lab, he has devised a way to introduce an extra set of chromosomes into abalone, rendering them triploid, or sterile.

“There has been some good work done with scallops and oysters as triploids,” McCormick said. “Seedless watermelons are triploids. We have borrowed some of those techniques and applied them to abalone to create an animal that does not sexually mature.

“We suspect the abalone will channel the energy not used for reproducing toward meat production and shell growth.”

McCormick and his helpers had been working toward a triploid abalone for several years when they finally met with success last January by carefully manipulating the fertilization of abalone eggs.

“The male and female brood stock are placed in separate buckets and made to spawn through light conditions and special feedings,” McCormick said. “We add the sperm to the eggs and stir it up.

“Right after fertilization, we shock the egg with either cold or hot water,” he said. “This prevents the egg from pinching off the third set of chromosomes. . . .”

The larvae are then allowed to develop until they reach the size of small garden snails, when they are placed in one of the lab’s specially designed tanks to feed on algae. When they are larger, they will be moved to another tank and will feed on kelp.

Abalone, a mollusk prized for its delicately flavored meat and mother-of-pearl shell, grow only about an inch per year, so the experiment has required a lot of patience from McCormick and his assistants. But the results could aid other abalone farmers in producing a market-sized shellfish in less than the usual four years.

“Man by nature is impatient. We don’t want to wait a millennium for a perfect abalone.”