(slow music)
- [Narrator] This is a red abalone.
It's basically the oceans' version of a garden snail.
It lives primarily on large rocks
in the lush kelp forests of California.
It's also been a popular delicacy
in the state for over a century.
While wild red abalone is not available
to commercial fishermen,
recreational abalone divers in northern California
can snorkel down to the rocks, pry off a snail,
and bring it home for a barbecue.
That is until recently.
Something is happening to the kelp forests
and it's threatening the survival of the species
and the northern California communities
that rely on the red abalone for business.
In December of 2018 California Fish and Game
decided to close down the recreational
abalone fishery until 2021
in hopes that they give this sea snail population
a chance to rebound.
- My name is Joe Cresalia.
I've been diving since 1969, 50 years.
The North California coast,
it's just an incredibly beautiful place.
The topography, the really high cliffs,
the big rocks that stick out of the water,
it's almost prehistoric in that way.
You feel like you've really gone off into another world.
What we're catching up here, the red abalone,
there's a variety of abalone,
but the red abalone traditionally
is what your grandparents would think of
if they were seeing abalone on the coast.
For people that think they don't like fish
or people that don't think they like shellfish,
it's amazing to see their eyes just sparkle
when they take a bit of it and go,
"This is absolutely incredible."
And you know before they took the bite
they were almost afraid to take a bite.
- [Narrator] In 1916 California established
a commercial fishery for wild red abalone.
But in 1997 commercial fishery closed
due to a dwindling population.
20 years later the recreational fishery closed
when purple sea urchins ravaged the kelp forests
and left the red abalone dying of starvation.
- I appreciate what Fish and Game has done
and I think anybody intelligent does
and it's recently closing it down
with something I had predicted by watching the ocean.
There's a couple of places,
I've literally been diving for 50 years,
and there really wasn't enough kelp.
You can see it.
You would see the kelp stumps
and four or five sea urchins on it just chomping it.
It looked like someone had come in
with a chainsaw and just cut it.
You're going down and you're seeing
like a blanket of sea urchins.
The kelp was disappearing,
the abalone you weren't seeing as many of
'cause they were off looking for food,
and there was an unbalance.
I wear a dive watch that gives me
my depth and my water temperature
and I was noticing the water temperature getting higher,
and I was used to the water being
49, 51, kind of in that range,
sometimes it'd be in a little colder,
it'd be a little warmer,
but I was seeing spikes where the water
was 54 or 55 degrees at times.
For 40 years I'd seen pretty much
the same type of temperate consistently,
and to see those types of variances made me wonder.
(waves crashing)
The bottom's changing, there's no question about it,
and you could see old abalone shells broken and stuff
where abalone have died.
So yeah,
life's changed on the bottom.
It's going through a change.
(slow music)
- My name is Dr. Laura Rogers-Bennet
and I am a Senior Environmental Scientist
here at the Bodega Marine Laboratory.
Abalone are very much an indicator
of the health of the kelp forest.
They are very sensitive to any changes in food abundance.
They're not able to switch over and eat meat,
and so when their numbers go down
we know there's something going wrong in the kep forest.
(slow music)
- In 2013 we had a sea star wasting disease
that hit our coast really hard
and that took out a lot of predatory sea stars.
After that we had the warm blob
and the El Nino of 2014 and '15.
- Up in the Gulf of Alaska there formed a warm water blob
and the oceanographers called it a "blob,"
and so that warm water sat in a patch
and extended all the way down to our region,
and that feature set up and didn't move,
and just stayed there.
- [Katie] That took out all of our kelp
because the water got too warm for our kep to survive.
- [Narrator] Studies done on the blob
showed that while there were a number
of natural drivers that formed it,
human-generated global warming likely made it worse.
- Shortly after that we had the purple urchin explosion
of around 2015 and '16.
They can mow down forests like lawnmowers,
and they multiply very quickly,
and they grow very quickly.
They grow a lot quicker than species like abalone,
so the abalone can't really keep up
with their eating habits.
The purple urchin are taking the kelp
before it can even get to a mature age,
so they're eating baby kelps before they can reproduce,
and that's what's causing this huge urchin barren
that we've been seeing.
Usually in a healthy ecosystem a red abalone
would be hidden under a rock.
Lately we've been seeing them on top of rocks,
and they're almost half to three-quarters of their body
are perched up, and they're just waiting
for anything to drift by and float
into their muscle or their mouth.
So, it's a little bit of an odd sighting.
Some divers have a little bit of kelp
they keep in their pockets in case they pass a red abalone
and you can put kelp in front of an abalone
and it will lurch up.
It's really wild to watch.
It will actually lurch up like a puppy dog
that just smelled a treat
and it will almost unhinge its whole body
just to go grab that piece of kelp, and it tucks it in,
and it kind of like holds it from
all of the other urchin that are usually around it.
We collected new numbers as of 2018
and we didn't see any improvement in the abalone population.
If anything we saw more declines.
- So we typically see around 24,000 to 26,000 divers
coming to dive, and rock-pick, and collect abalone,
but they're also coming with a lot
of their friends and family.
It's estimated that the recreational red abalone fishery
is worth about $44 million to the local communities
and to the fishermen who are participating in the fishery.
- Silver's at the Wharf is a full-service
seafood and steak restaurant, and 17 lodging rooms
which are used principally by fishermen.
My name is Jim Hurst and we invented Silver's at the Wharf
in Northern Harbor, Fort Bragg, California.
The impact of the abalone closure
is somewhere about $30,000 to $40,000 a month
that's attributed to loss of food sales and lodging sales.
Once you lose that business you don't get it back.
It's interesting to compare what's going on today
to when our mill closed,
and when the mill closed everybody thought,
oh my God, we're gonna die.
It's gonna have a huge impact and it can't be replaced.
- My name is Chris Brians, we're here at Harvest Market,
I am a grocery clerk, I have worked here for 29 years.
There is a large amount of people
that came to Fort Bragg to go diving.
The whole family would come.
April first comes and goes now,
whereas before you could see the influx
of the people that were going diving.
- I think seeing and understanding
how interconnected everything is,
being able to pick your food out of the ocean like that,
you have an appreciation for the effort
that goes into it and where it comes from.
This isn't from some abstract store someplace,
this is actually your activities,
and you see how it grows, and there's a relationship.
It should be a relationship of stewardship.
This is a source of food, and you wanna protect it,
and you wanna take care of it
so that you can continue to do it.
It's a renewable resource as long as it's properly handled.
- As the globe warms we're going
to have more marine heatwaves,
we're going to have longer duration heatwaves,
and they're going to be broader geographic extent.
And so I think this is really giving us
an inkling of what is to come.
- It's quite sad that these people
that have done this for generations have to stop.
- It's interesting, recently I was talking to some people
and somebody made the comment,
"Yeah, nature's gonna heal itself,
"the question is will man go along with it or not,
"or will he make the environment so intolerable for itself
"that that'll be it."
I'd like to think mankind will go on also and be part of it.
(waves crashing)
(slow music)