The Mystery of the Missing Mollusks : California’s Abalone Population Is Disappearing, and Scientists and Volunteer Divers Are Joining Forces to Stop the Decline

GLIDING THROUGH THE WATER 60 feet beneath the surface off Anacapa Island, the three divers knew what they had to do.

They had stepped in perfect synchronization off the deck of the Sea Ventures, a 50-foot charter boat specially outfitted with an on-board compressor and tank racks, and made their way to the anchor line at the stern. Bobbing on the surface for what seemed an interminable time, they waited for the signal to descend, then slipped beneath the waves, one of them dangling a green mesh bag from his belt and the others carrying the knives they would need for their work.

Carefully, they inched their way along the bottom, hunting for the objects they knew were there. Suddenly they came into sight: three boxy structures squatting ghostlike in the sand. Working quickly, Terry Lambert took a knife and tore open the bag while Steve Patchis began removing the chicken-wire cover that guarded the dark opening of the first structure.

Then, slowly, handling the bag as gingerly as if it were full of precious gems, they began to empty its contents into the block box. What came out were three-inch roundish shells, each housing a squishy animal resembling a garden snail. In the context of California’s fragile coastal ecology, these creatures were precious--juvenile abalones fresh from a farm in Oxnard. Now they were being personally escorted to their first abalone condo.

For hundreds of years, these mysterious animals have been objects of wonder, beloved by Indians, coveted by immigrants from China and Japan and sought by underwater adventurers, gourmets and collectors of fine jewelry.

Today they are disappearing. Buffeted by man-made pollution, a massive harvesting by commercial and sport divers, and a dramatic increase in predators such as sea otters, the California abalone was already scarce. Then came the most recent horror: a mysterious ailment that causes some of the animals to wither and die in a matter of weeks. In a few short years, it has already wiped out as much as 99% of the population of black abalones, one of the eight types found in California, throughout much of the Channel Islands. After holding emergency seminars and engaging in frantic research projects, scientists say they are no closer to understanding the problem than when they started studying it five years ago.

But now a grass-roots mobilization is under way to save these icons of California culture. At its heart are such people as Lambert and Patchis, two of the more than 300 amateur sport divers who have donated their time and skills to an ambitious abalone research project being conducted by the National Park Service, which oversees five of the eight Channel Islands, with the help of the state Department of Fish and Game. Organizers describe it as the biggest volunteer effort by divers in the state’s history, and depending on its outcome, it could change the way California manages its coastline.

Paul Doose, one of the volunteers aboard the Sea Ventures during its recent cruise, can recall when abalones lay piled five-deep on the reefs off Catalina Island, clearly visible from the surface and within easy reach of anyone capable of holding his breath for more than 30 seconds. That was in the 1930s, when Doose, now 72 and a retired teacher living in Oxnard, was a young boy attending Scout camp on the island and intent on catching enough abalones for a feast at summer’s end.

“We didn’t even have to use masks,” he says. “You could see them shining up from the bottom--they were everywhere. You could just hold your breath and get a couple each time you went down.”

Classified as mollusks, abalones cling to rocks at depths ranging from the intertidal zone to greater than 100 feet, where they may live for up to 20 years. Of the approximately 100 abalone species found worldwide, eight--each named for its hue or general physical characteristics--reside in California waters: red, pink, black, green, white, pinto, flat and threaded. The pinks, usually found in less than 60 feet of water, are among the most common abalone along the coast, though that distinction shifts somewhat over time. Grazing on kelp, algae and other forms of plant life, the creatures generally spend their lives within the relatively limited confines of the particular rock formation they call home.

By studying shell mounds--known as middens--throughout the Channel Islands, archeologists have discovered evidence that prehistoric Indians depended on the abalone as early as 10,000 years ago on San Clemente Island; 7,400 years ago on Santa Rosa; and 4,000 years ago on Catalina. Gathering the animals by hand during low tide, the Indians used the abalone primarily for food. But they also used the animals’ large shells, with their mother-of-pearl interiors, for bowls, fishhooks, ornaments, beads, pendants, scrapers and knives, as well as for intricate inlay work on their pots and as decorations on wooden spears.

Highly valued for their lustrous sheen, the shells were often used for barter, sometimes turning up in the possession of tribes as far away as Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. Some tribes, archeologists say, even fashioned their currency out of the shells. Called whello , the money was usually circular, ranging roughly from the size of a quarter to that of a silver dollar, with the value of each piece dependent on its size and brilliance.

Mark Raab, a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Public Archeology at Cal State Northridge, has spent the last four years studying abalone middens on Catalina. Among his most striking discoveries is that even the Indians had trouble keeping the abalone in ample supply.

“There is a common-sense tendency to think that the ocean is a vast and potentially tremendously productive environment, and that the Indians had a horn of plenty,” Raab says. “In fact, the direct pressure the Indians were exerting on the abalone population was tremendous.”

The relatively small size of the shells found in the middens, Raab says, tells scientists that the animals harvested by the Indians were fairly young--in most cases too young to have reproduced. As a result, he says, the supply in any area periodically ran out, forcing the Indians to relocate.

“They would settle on the shore and literally eat themselves out of house and home, then pack up and move to another portion of the shore,” the anthropologist says. “But there were always a few abalone in the rocks that the Indians couldn’t find.” Eventually these would reproduce, creating a new population of abalones to be consumed by a new generation of Indians.

Fortunately for those who came later, the Indian population remained small enough that it never made a permanent dent in the number of abalones. That would be left to future Californians.

The abalones’ decline can be traced back to the early 1850s and the arrival of Chinese immigrants who served as cheap labor to help build the railroads and work the mines. Recognizing the local abalone as similar to those of their native land, where they were considered culinary delicacies, the newcomers by 1879 created a commercial abalone industry that harvested 4.1 million pounds of meat and shells a year, most of it for export to China. Later came the Japanese, whose expert diving techniques gave them an advantage over their skiff-bound competitors, who used poles to knock the abalones loose. The Japanese divers dominated the industry until World War II, when many were sent to government internment camps, and a flood of non-Japanese divers rushed in to take their place.

Californians have, until recently, taken the abalone for granted. Craftsmen and entrepreneurs have made its mother-of-pearl shells into ashtrays and jewelry. Thousands of West Coast kids grew up with rows of abalone shells decorating poolside fences and gardens. And hundreds of thousands of California scuba divers have spent countless weekends scouring local waters for the mollusks, which they brought home to be pounded into tender steaks, breaded and sauteed.

“Abalone is one of the few animals out here with a significant place in California culture,” says Armand Kuris, a UC Santa Barbara zoology professor commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study the decline of the organism. “It’s one of those magic, romantic animals in California history and culture--like the sea otter, salmon, pismo clam and grunion.”

Michael Hutchings, chef and proprietor of Michael’s Waterside restaurant in Santa Barbara, one of the handful of Southern California eating establishments that still serves abalone entrees, agrees. “If you’re from Texas,” he says, “a steak has a certain mystique to it. If you’re from California, it’s abalone.”

ONE DAY IN THE FALL of 1986, Gary Davis and Dan Richards, marine biologists with the National Park Service, were walking along the beach at Anacapa Island on a routine check of the island’s black abalone population when they noticed something strange: huge, skeleton-like piles of broken abalone shells, some dotted with rotting meat, lying eerily in the tide pools.

When they examined the few animals still alive, Davis and Richard found that many were extremely weak. Instead of clamping down hard the way healthy abalones do when confronted by human touch, these black abalones could be pulled off their rocks without even a pry bar. The rotting shells in the tide pools had apparently fallen off of their own accord. Davis observed that their “feet”--the fleshy part visible outside the shells--had inexplicably withered to a fraction of their original size.

Alarmed, Davis, a large, soft-spoken man of 47, began spreading the word about this mysterious “withering foot syndrome” among fellow scientists and making regular trips back to Anacapa to chart the malady’s course. What he found was disturbing: In a few short years, this sinister condition had wiped out most of the Channel Islands’ black abalone population. The original cluster of 550 animals counted at Anacapa in 1986 is now represented by a single surviving abalone. At Santa Barbara Island, 177 observable animals have dwindled to one; 419 at Santa Rosa are now reduced to three; and at San Miguel, 544 have become about 50.

Concerned scientists formed task forces, conducted research projects, held conferences and published papers in a frantic effort to understand the syndrome. Most of the early conjecture, says Kuris of UC Santa Barbara, centered on a protozoan parasite discovered in the kidneys of the diseased animals. But subsequent investigation, he says, revealed the same protozoa to be present in the kidneys of healthy abalones, effectively eliminating it as the culprit.

Today, theories have multiplied as to the cause of the condition. Davis believes that it has to do with the El Ninos of 1983 and ‘84--violent storms that tore up the kelp beds upon which the abalones graze. Increased competition for a decreased amount of food, he said, may have stressed the animals to the point where they are dying.

Others theorize that California’s five-year drought has raised the salinity of the ocean to levels that apparently are intolerable to abalones or that the mysterious withering is the manifestation of pollution or an undiscovered disease.

All of these theories are under consideration in a study being conducted by Kuris. After striking out on the protozoan front, he and fellow researchers made a series of detailed examinations comparing dead abalones to their healthy counterparts--a task that is ongoing. In addition, Kuris is planning a sophisticated computer-aided analysis that will match the malady’s geographic occurrence pattern with such variables as plankton, temperature, salinity and current.

Based on the experience of the past several months, the zoologist says, he is not optimistic. “We have lost ground,” he says. “The initial candidates that looked promising look less promising now. In a certain sense we are further from a solution today than when we started.”

Withering foot is only one of several factors contributing to the demise of the abalone, Gary Davis says. He blames about 10% of the decline on the dramatic population increase among California’s sea otters, each of which is capable of consuming several times its weight in abalones each day. The increase in the once-declining otter population dates from 1900, when hunting the animals was outlawed, and was further assured in 1972 when they were placed on the endangered species list. Their numbers have since rebounded to the point where their status has been downgraded from endangered to threatened.

Pollution, particularly in the form of oil spills, industrial runoff and untreated sewage, also has taken a toll. With the environment damaged to the extent that conditions are no longer ideal for the propagation of many marine species, many forms of sea life that were fairly common have declined. Scientists, however, say the effect is so general that they have not documented its specific impact on abalones. And some environmentalists contend that inadequate restrictions--among them a ban on the use of scuba gear for gathering abalones north of Point Conception and a ban on abalone harvesting along most of the Orange County coastline--also have contributed to the major reduction in their numbers. In 1957, California divers harvested about 2,500 metric tons of the shellfish, Davis says. By 1969, the annual take had fallen to about 1,600 metric tons, and in 1975 to about 1,000 metric tons. By the mid-1980s, the annual yield had dwindled to a mere 200 metric tons--more than a 90% drop in 30 years.

One of the major reasons for the dramatic near-disappearance of the abalone, some researchers believe, is that modern divers, like the Indians, tend to take the animals before many have a chance to reproduce. Despite state Fish and Game and National Park Service regulations prohibiting the taking of abalones below certain sizes and then only in season, the abalone is still declining. Davis maintains the government’s thinking is based on a fatal assumption: that abalones reproduce every year when, in fact, they may reproduce only every seven years.

To understand Davis’ theory, one must know something of the sex life of an abalone, which is not terribly sexy by human standards. According to Davis, male abalones release clouds of sperm into the water while female abalones release millions of eggs. If the two happen to meet, the egg is fertilized and a larva is formed. Then, if conditions are right--if they aren’t eaten by fish, killed by pollution or dashed on the shore during storms--the larvae will eventually grow into baby abalones.

The problem, Davis believes, is that only rarely--perhaps once every six or seven years--do all the conditions line up just right to produce a successful spawning. So if an abalone is taken, as most are, before it is 5 years old, it probably hasn’t yet produced enough offspring to counteract the immense appetite of its carnivorous opposition, which, besides otters and people, includes some types of fish.

“They’re trying to win the biological lottery,” Davis says, “and we’ve now reduced their probability of winning so much that even in good years they can’t produce enough larvae to create the next generation.”

One answer might be to increase size limits so that only older abalones can be taken. But that, Davis maintains, would also make it far more likely that an abalone would die of natural causes before being caught, thus benefiting no one.

His preferred solution is to create a series of diver-free zones along the California coastline where abalone could fill the ocean with sperm and eggs to their hearts’ content. Some of the resulting larvae, he theorizes, would naturally be carried by ocean currents into surrounding waters, where they would grow into adults and thrive.

TO SELL HIS SCHEME, HOWEVER, Davis must first prove his theories regarding the frequency, or infrequency, of abalone spawning. Eventually, he hopes, the data will spur the National Park Service and the Department of Fish and Game to propose his plan to the state Legislature. As a beginning, he said, a group of scientists from throughout the state and as far away as Australia will hold a conference on abalones in Southern California in March.

Several groups--including the Department of Fish and Game and various private diving clubs--have attempted to “reseed” abalone beds by placing laboratory-grown animals in natural rock or man-made underwater habitats. Generally these efforts have proved costly and ineffective because of the large amounts of labor involved, spurring current research to focus on the long-term benefits of enhancing reproduction.

Thus it was that on a recent Saturday afternoon, members of the Channel Islands Council of Divers gathered at an Oxnard abalone farm to begin bagging some of the 6,000 abalones in anticipation of installing them in abalone condominiums off two Channel Islands and then documenting how successfully they spawn.

Juvenile reds and pinks, the animals were donated by the Department of Fish and Game from a Northern California abalone farm that had closed. (The shortage has spawned a new industry in the handful of “abalone farms” that have sprung up along the coast, primarily to supply restaurants with a steady source of baby abalones for use as appetizers. One of the best known is the Ab Lab, a facility on the naval civil engineering base in Port Hueneme, which raises more than 3 million small abalones a year.) The juvenile abalones had made the trip down the coast wrapped in burlap bags and stuffed into ice chests in the back of a pickup truck. Now they were in a cramped laboratory next to Southern California Edison’s Ormond Beach generating plant in Oxnard, living on corrugated plastic sheets hanging in tanks through which 15,000 gallons of seawater circulate in an hour.

As each plastic sheet was pulled out of its darkened tank and placed on a table in the sun, its slimy inhabitants scurried for shade. The task at hand was to scrape them off the plastic using rusted butter knives.

“They’re quick little buggers,” said diver Perry Ferguson, flipping an abalone into the air like a pancake.

Ferguson, 47, a wiry, outspoken man with a mustache, had, as president of the 75-member divers council, been looking for a way to get sport divers involved in activities that would take them beyond merely diving for pleasure. After a meeting with Davis, he decided that abalones could be the key, figuring that the average sport diver’s familiarity with the animal would inspire widespread involvement.

Ferguson’s hunch proved correct. After advertising the project in diving publications and by word of mouth, he had 300 volunteers. “A lot of divers are changing their ways,” he says. “We are trying to help put back into the environment something we’ve been taking away for all these years. This is the largest edible mollusk we have; it would be a shame to lose such a magnificent animal.”

The group began constructing dozens of habitats, each made of 10 cement blocks held together by chicken wire and weighing 223 pounds. Meeting Saturdays in a Ventura parking lot, they built the structures to protect the baby abalones from predators and to be quickly disassembled under water for easy inspection of the inhabitants.

During a series of dives in 1991, they carefully placed the structures in clusters off Anacapa and Santa Cruz islands. Later, they began seeding the “abalone condos” with young residents, 200 to a condo. Over the next five years, the volunteers, bearing all expenses themselves, plan to return several times each year to count the number of abalone offspring in the habitats.

The recent journey of the Sea Ventures was an important part of the process. After spending much of Saturday filling the mesh bags with baby abalones, the divers had hauled the animals aboard, then retired early to nearby hotels or homes to rest up for the trip. It was a good thing they did: Sunday’s diving had turned rugged as groups of divers battled currents and choppy seas to locate the carefully placed habitats.

Eventually they did and, fanning out in teams, took the abalones down to their new homes. Later, sipping a warm cup of coffee in the cabin of the Sea Ventures, Steve Patchis talked about the dive. “It was very gratifying,” said Patchis, owner of a tool-and-die shop in Canoga Park. “Whenever you can give something back to the ocean, it feels good.”

Added Terry Lambert, an auto body shop manager from Riverside: “If we don’t start doing something now, there won’t be anything left for my son’s son.”