If Nancy Caruso has her way, in a short while there could be thousands of abalone babies off the Orange County coastline again.
Caruso, a marine biologist, has restocked and grown green abalone on reefs off Crystal Cove State Park. The 14-month project – made possible by private funding and volunteers – was completed a few months ago.
Success means taking it to the next step.
Caruso has raised $45,000 and plans to collect wild abalone off the coast to be used to brood more babies. The collected abalone will be in foster care at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point until July. Then Caruso will take them to a farm in Goleta – where farmers who raised market abalone will help during the spawning process in August and September. She hopes to release the brood parents back to the ocean when they’re done.
Abalone release eggs and sperm in the water. That’s where they fertilize and begin eating and growing. In a month, a microscopic-sized shell. In a year, they are nickel-sized. The babies will stay at the farm for a year. Adult abalone grow by consuming as much as a giant kelp blade a day.
Caruso will take about 100,000 babies and lend them to project partner aquariums such as the Ocean Institute, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro and the California Science Center in Los Angeles. She also has plans for about 40 local schools to help by growing abalone in science projects.
The abalone will remain at the aquariums for five years. Then with a permit from the state’s Fish & Wildlife Agency, she will put them into the ocean at one-year intervals.
On Saturday, Caruso will have three of the Crystal Cove-raised abalone on display at the sixth annual Kelpfest at Main Beach in Laguna Beach. The festival’s aim is to inform people about the ocean’s biodiversity. Green abalone is a federally listed species of interest and is critical to the marine ecosystem.
More than two years ago, Caruso began studying wild abalone on a reef about 100 yards off Laguna Beach’s marine protected shoreline. She dove nearly daily and recorded data on starfish, crabs, anemones and algae. She mapped the reef, making note of cracks and crevices.
She found randomly spread teenage abalone clinging to rocks. Abalone need to be within three feet of each other to reproduce. They forage on kelp and clean the ocean floor of dead kelp debris.
Caruso used the Laguna reef as a model to launch her abalone project off Newport Beach in 2013, where she planted 69 mature abalone from brood stock at the Goleta farm. Caruso opted to use older abalone, from 10 to 15 years old, because other scientists had been unsuccessful using young, small abalone.
She planted the abalone in three phases. During the first two phases, Caruso noted that about 51 percent of the abalone died during the first two weeks. She found that they died while moving toward darker ledges along the reef. Once she changed their placement, about 39 percent survived.
She and a team of volunteer divers checked every 48 hours. They found that the abalone traveled across sand. They seemed to stay in the direction of the prevailing swell, which likely helped them get to drifting giant kelp.
They found that a mystery predator was regularly smashing abalone shells and leaving the shards in a heap near the reef. She put up a sign saying the area was under surveillance, and that stopped the problem. Recent research shows that poaching of abalone is equal to recreational take in Northern California, where free divers are allowed, with restrictions, to take abalone in three counties.
Caruso’s abalone project is modeled after a successful kelp restoration project she launched with 37 Orange County schools in 2002. Students grew kelp attached to tiles. Divers planted tens of thousands of the quarter-inch plants into 5 acres of underwater habitat off Laguna and Newport Beach. By 2009, the kelp was lush and thriving for the first time in 30 years.
The success of the kelp project led to Caruso to hold the first Kelpfest in 2010. She and co-founder Mike Beanan have kept ocean awareness going since then.
“All of a sudden our kelp was growing and we thought we’d have a party,” she said. “Laguna had kelp washing on the beach, which it hadn’t had in 25 years. We started Kelpfest to foster an appreciation for kelp.”
After the success of kelp restoration, Caruso spent three years getting permits from the state agency to replenish abalone.
The tiny marine gastropod is related to the snail and has a history of being hunted in California.
From the 1800s until 1997, abalone hunters searched reefs in Southern California for the marine animal. When scuba diving became popular, abalone harvests reached 1,440 per day per diver, Caruso said. Harvesting went to almost 3 million pounds in 1970.
In 1997, state wardens cracked down on abalone fishermen. Left alone, abalone began returning, and game wardens are now seeing more poaching violations.
Contact the writer: 714-796-2254 or eritchie@ocregister.com or Twitter:@lagunaini
