Wednesday February 5, 2025
High Country News —
On a cool October day, the wind whipped around Nathaniel Fletcher as he bear-crawled his way along a rocky reef in the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve, a protected area on California’s central coast. He reached into cracks and peered into crevices with a flashlight, hoping to find an endangered marine snail whose shell recently has become California’s state seashell: the black abalone.
Seven species of abalone were once abundant along the California coast. Now, climate change and overfishing have driven all seven to the edge of extinction. The black abalone’s road to recovery is particularly challenging: Unlike other abalone species, researchers have not yet been able to grow it in captivity. But new efforts may give this iconic gastropod a fighting chance. A group of scientists have successfully translocated black abalone to Dangermond, boosting their numbers there, and Fletcher, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz who leads the field project, is working with scientists from The Nature Conservancy and NOAA to monitor the animals as they settle into their new habitat.
Black abalone have a ridged navy-and-black shell encasing a fleshy body with a muscular foot that they use to sucker onto rocks. Mature abalone can be up to 8 inches long, longer than the average human hand. But the black abalone’s most striking feature is typically hidden — the underside of its shell, which is a pearlescent, psychedelic array of greens and pinks. The snails reside in rocky intertidal zones, where they eat dead kelp and serve as food for other species, including sea otters.