What’s Being Done to Revive L.A.’s Decimated Abalone Population

”Being slow and tasty is always a liability”

In the Bay Foundation’s two-year-old Abalone Research Laboratory on Terminal Island, abalone of varying sizes pass their days submerged in white tanks of saltwater. They look more like bewhiskered stones than snails, but when a palm-size one is removed from the water, the mollusk rises up on the muscular foot it uses to attach to surfaces and swivels defensively to the left and right. As two tiny eyes peer out from beneath the shell, short tentacles tickle the air, revealing a certain obstinate charm.

“You hang out with them long enough, and then you just fall in love with them. I don’t know why,” says Heather Burdick, the foundation’s marine programs manager.

The Ab Lab is part of an effort to revive the decimated abalone population in the waters of L.A. There was a time when the area teemed with abalone—not just red and green but also white, pink, black, pinto, and flat.

“They used to be just stacked up on top of one another, like paving stones,” says Tom Ford, the Bay Foundation’s executive director. Prized as delicacies by Chinese and Japanese immigrants who arrived in the mid-19th century, the […]

Full article: What’s Being Done to Revive L.A.’s Decimated Abalone Population