Our Once-Abundant Earth

Protecting species from extinction is not nearly enough.

When Otis Parrish was a kid in the 1940s, abalone were abundant. Each abalone grows in a single, beautiful opalescent shell, which can get as big as a dinner plate. Parrish’s father showed him how to pry the abalone off the rocky shoreline at low tide with an oak stick or the end of a sharpened leaf spring. Or, best of all, how to take the abalone unawares and grab them with his bare hands before they had time to fasten tight to the rocks. His mother’s village was called Dukašal, or “Abaloneville” in the Kashaya Pomo tribe’s language, notwithstanding its location five miles and two steep ridges inland from Stewarts Point on the California coast. The ocean gave the Kashaya people protein and ceremonial food. “We call [abalone] ‘Champion of the Sea,’” Parrish told me over coffee in nearby Windsor, California, one recent morning.

Newcomers to the state started eating abalone in far greater quantities in the mid-1800s. They went into deeper water with skiffs and long poles, and began free diving and subsequently diving from boats with air hoses to harvest the shellfish. Commercial capture passed 1 million pounds a year around 1920. Apart from a dip during World War II, abalone hauls totaled several million pounds a year for decades. When the pink-abalone population crashed in the early 1970s, people fished for more red abalone, whose decline, in turn, was compensated by increased pursuit of the green, white, and black species. They were all flatlining by the mid-1980s. In 1997, California banned commercial abalone fishing.

For years, red abalone was the only species sufficiently abundant to support even a limited recreational fishery. Tens of thousands of divers plucked nearly a quarter million abalone a year in Northern California. Then came 2017. Divers would pull abalone off the rocks only to find mostly empty shells. Scientists concluded that the abalone were starving because a record marine heat wave had weakened the kelp forest, and an epidemic, exacerbated by the hot water, killed more than 90 percent of sunflower sea stars from 2013 to 2017. Abalone and sunflower sea stars don’t have anything to do with each other directly, but the latter eat purple sea urchins, which eat kelp, which abalone also eat. When the sea-star population crashed, urchin numbers exploded, and a spiny purple horde clear-cut the remaining kelp. Biologists presumed that the abalone scooted around the rocks looking for their staple seaweed, found none, and perished. California’s last abalone fishery closed…