It’s with a guilty conscious that I recall my dad SCUBA diving for abalone in the San Juans when I was a kid in the ’70s. He and other divers helped hammer the population of the tasty mollusks.
Their numbers got so low, my colleague Robert McClure last year wrote this article about the “lonely abalone,” explaining:
The state halted abalone fishing 13 years ago. But mysteriously, their decline continues. Remaining abalone are scattered so thin that when they try to make babies — we’ll get to the racy details a little later — many just can’t seem to, uh, get it together.
Today SeaDoc, a non-profit science and conservation group, released data showing that a project they funded to boost northern abalone numbers is working.
One year ago, 281 tagged juvenile abalone were released at four sites in Freshwater Bay in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The little fellas were monitored by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Shellfish Dive Team at two days, two weeks, two months, six months and a year after release.
According to press release from SeaDoc: “The results are very promising.”
The survival rate of the abalone was 12.5 percent, which researchers considered great. Nearly one-quarter of the bigger abalone survived. They also grew fast, for a mollusk at least. The average annual growth was about 3/4 of an inch and one individual went from under 2 inches to more than 3 inches; two abalone doubled in size.