In California abalone is big business. In 1957 the yearly commercial abalone harvest peaked at 5 million pounds, and dropped to around 300,000 pounds annually in the mid 1990s. Sport harvesters in Northern California currently take some 2 million pounds of abalone per year, and spend an estimated $10 million to do so. With the closure of commercial take in 1997, the price of a poached abalone has risen to between $80 and $100 per abalone, and the value of abalone poached each year is estimated at $1.2 million. The abalone harvest in Sonoma and Mendocino counties has increased about 27 percent since southern waters were closed in 1997.
The regulations governing the take of abalone in California are among the most complex of any fishery. You may think this is an effort by the Fish and Game Commission to confuse and harass divers, but there are good reasons why the regulations have evolved to what they are today. In this article I hope to remove the mystery surrounding the latest changes to the regulations.
This April the new, reduced bag limit of 3 abalone per day and 24 per year takes effect, down from 4 per day and 100 per year. State biologists anticipate that this change will result in a 41 percent drop in take over 2000 levels. The casual abalone diver (myself included) sees a great deal of legal-sized abalone out there, and questions why the limit needed to be reduced. Fish and Game Senior Biologist Kon Karpov agrees that there are large numbers of legal abalone out there now, “…but, there are not very many sub-legal abalone.”
To understand why this is an important statement, you need to know a little bit about abalone biology. Abalone are slow growing. A 7-inch abalone is 11 to 14 years old, bigger abalone may be more than 25 years old. Abalone are broadcast spawners; they release eggs and sperm into the water column and hope they get together. A girl abalone cannot be much more than three feet away from a boy abalone for effective spawning to take place. So abalone density matters, if abalone concentrations drop below some critical level, effective spawning stops.
In many years the conditions required for an effective spawning season are not particularly good and few baby abalone are added to the reef. This may be due to food availability, water temperature, currents, etc. In other years conditions are “just right” and a good recruitment of juvenile abalone occurs. While some recruitment occurs every year, most of the abalone we see are due to the “big recruitment years.” These years of good recruitment happen irregularly, maybe as little as one in 10 or 20 years. The last big recruitment began around 1986, and the big ab populations we see now were “born” then.