Mexico Fishermen Hoping to Plant the Seeds of Their Future : Marine biology: An Oxnard lab has developed technology that, if successful, could sustain shrinking abalone populations.

A modest oceanside laboratory here has produced a technology that a group of Mexican fishermen hope will save their livelihood and preserve a way of life handed down to them through generations.

The laboratory, McCormick & Associates at windy Ormond Beach, has developed a technique that, if successful, will plant enough baby abalone in the waters off Baja California Sur to sustain their shrinking populations.

By acting now to replenish the rapidly diminishing resource, the Mexican fishermen’s cooperative, Emancipacion, hopes to avoid the abalone population crashes in its waters that have sent the commercial catch off Southern California plummeting by 90% over the past 30 years.

“We are trying to protect our resource for those who are now fishermen and for their sons who will come after them,” said Fidel Savalos, an administrator at Emancipacion, in the tiny village of Bahia de Tortugas (Turtle Bay) in Baja.

But the technology, unproven as yet, is an expensive undertaking for the small cooperative of about 90 members, Savalos said. The cooperative has already spent about $600,000 to build the new lab in Baja and start up the program, and will probably spend $50,000 to $75,000 each year as long as the research continues.

Nevertheless, Emancipacion, considered by officials at the American Consulate General’s office in Tijuana to be one of the most progressive cooperatives in Mexico, is willing to take the risk.

“We are looking to the future,” Savalos said.

Biologists in California, including those at the Oxnard laboratory, have been working for 10 to 20 years to develop technology to breed laboratory abalone for commercial profit and to restore Southern California fisheries. But now, with Emancipacion’s desire for long-term resource preservation, biologists are sharing technology and expertise with their neighbors to the south.

“They’ve seen what has happened with the overfishing in California and northern Baja,” said Thomas B. McCormick, the biologist who founded the Oxnard laboratory. “They want to do something about it before it happens there.”

Overfishing off Southern California and Baja California, along with what some experts say is fisheries mismanagement by the U.S. and Mexican governments, has caused a dramatic drop in abalone population. The number of abalone clustered together--a crucial factor in reproduction--has also seriously declined.

In Southern California, the eight species found in waters of the Channel Islands National Park once numbered more than 1,400 per acre. Now biologists can find densities of only about seven per acre.

No figures were available on the abalone densities in the waters of Baja, but Channel Islands biologists said Mexican waters had begun experiencing similar population declines.

Some species of abalone, which can live to be 35 years old and can grow to nearly a foot in shell length, do not reproduce until they are 3 to 5 years old. Scientists believe that abalone may only successfully reproduce every five to seven years thereafter.

Emancipacion contacted McCormick & Associates two years ago after a five-year local effort to grow abalone had failed.

The Mexican government had sent an oceanologist to work with experts in Japan, where biologists lead the world in seeding the ocean with abalone. But, when the Mexicans attempted to apply the newly learned techniques in Mexico, they found that they did not have the correct source of food for the sensitive mollusks or enough experience in raising abalone, McCormick said. Their baby abalone died before they grew large enough to be released to the ocean.

When they called back to Japan for help, they were referred to McCormick, with whom the Japanese government had been working and trading technology for several years.

“Raising abalone is like raising sheep or cattle,” McCormick said. “It’s a very delicate balance: You have to raise the food at the same time you raise the livestock.”

McCormick and his laboratory associates developed a technique to raise micro algae to feed the abalone for the first six to eight months of their lives, when they are smaller than an inch in diameter.

The first of the abalone bred by a second McCormick laboratory set up at Puerto Nuevo, 40 miles south of Bahia de Tortugas, are now old enough to be released, and scientists will begin planting them in the ocean off Baja this month, McCormick said.

In the wild, fewer than one in a million abalone eggs live to about 1 year old, when they are about 1 inch long. In McCormick’s laboratory, about 50,000 eggs per million, or about 5%, live to be 1 year old.

That survival rate leaves McCormick optimistic for the success of the program in Mexico.

Gary Davis, head biologist at Channel Islands National Park, has less confidence in the program.

Using the technology to maintain a viable commercial fishery is still untried in the Western world, and no one is certain whether its success rate will be high enough in the long run to justify the initial expenses, he said.

The program might work, he said, but only if strict new limits are placed on catches and certain areas are placed off-limits to fishing altogether, Davis said.

In addition, because the older adult abalone are far more prolific reproducers than the 7-year-old juveniles, Davis said the whole concept of protecting juveniles and harvesting adults should be reconsidered.

But those radical concepts would mean a complete overhaul of the fishery management system used in the United States and Mexico.

Although McCormick’s laboratory has dramatically increased the survival rate of abalone from egg to 1-year-old, 60% of those survivors die before they reach 4 years old and about 4 inches long, the point at which they can be harvested and sold.

That makes the odds for success of the program very, very low, Davis said.

“The investment is 60 million abalone and wait six years to harvest 1 million,” he said. If those rates hold true, the investment would be $30 million to harvest $20 million six years later, figuring $20 paid for each abalone harvested.

“There is room to explore ways to sustain fisheries and restore depleted stock using hatchery-reared animals,” Davis said. “But, as a standard practice, like seeding a cornfield, it won’t work. The numbers are horrendous.”

But McCormick and the fishermen in Emancipacion are hopeful. Studies from Japan estimate a 10% survival rate from egg to 1-year-old, and that increases the number of those surviving to 4 years, he said.