Can the long-lost abalone make a comeback in California? | Hacker News Reader

Can the long-lost abalone make a comeback in California?

latimes.com

57 pointsilamont31 comments

Good article but it didn't mention predation from sea otters. At one point otters were almost hunted to extinction for their fur, and that allowed abalone populations to flourish. Now sea otters are protected and have stable populations in some areas so they're back to eating a lot of the abalone.

I think sea otters also play another critical role in California's ecosystem.

Sea urchins eat kelp forests. Sea otters eat sea urchins. Abalone live in kelp forests.

So I think that when sea otters are alive, then there are more kelp forests, which leads to more abalone net...even if sea otters are eating abalone.

The purple sea urchins which are currently destroying California's kelp forests are nearly inedible. They aren't the same urchin species that people eat in sushi. There's very little actual meat under the shell. Sea otters will only eat them when there's nothing else available.

Not nearly inedible, just not commercially practical for the effort versus the amount of meat inside. I prefer their taste over the commercially sold reds, they are sweeter in a wider range of seasons. Purple uni crushed up with soy sauce is the perfect sauce for sheephead sashimi.

Spread this information to any sushi chefs you know. The opportunity to help sustainable fisheries by eating puple urchins into obscurity is huge. It's what our economic system is best at.

By "inedible" I didn't mean that purple urchins taste bad necessarily (acquired taste). It's just that shelling them takes so much work that it's not worth the effort for chefs. There are millions and millions all along the coast; convincing a few people to eat them won't make a dent in the population.

That's what we thought about abalone, dodos, passenger pigeons and buffalo.

Fugu isn't exactly easy to process for eating, but people are willing to pay a LOT of money for the privilege of eating it.

All you need is the right marketing, and purple urchins will be like hen's teeth within 10 years.

Even if there were an increase in demand for the purples you'd still be hard pressed to get them commercially, California has been squeezing the number of licensed commercial boats down to about 100 and the market's flexibility is constrained by that.

Purple Sea urchins are an appreciated "connoisseur" dish in all Southern countries of Europe. They are really, really good in fact, with a fine flavour and soft taste, but only when in season, when they feed on the appropriate algae and when taken from a clean source.

I also wondered if the recent success of sea otter conservation efforts would be in conflict with abalone restoration. However, there seems to be evidence that, at least in the case of black abalone, abalone thrive in habitats where sea otters have been re-introduced[1]. One proposed mechanism for this is that sea otters prefer to eat sea urchins over abalone[2], and keeping the sea urchin population in check improves the overall health of the kelp forests which abalone need to survive.

[1] https://futureoftheocean.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/sea-otters...

[2] https://www.montereycountyweekly.com/blogs/animal_blog/of-ot...

Nitpicking the title:

The article title says "abalone" which can mean any of several species here in California:

The article is concerned with WHITE abalone making a comeback [2]. These are "Critically Imperiled" per their species status.

RED abalone are doing fine in California [1] with an "Apparently Secure" species status, and Cal Dept of Fish & Game will close down fishing when they need to, in order to allow for recovery.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haliotis_rufescens

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haliotis_sorenseni

It's just the title the actual article mentions efforts to repopulate all types (colours) of abalone.

If you are looking for a way to make a difference in protecting the abalone. Ruby for Good has a project that is helping conservation efforts https://github.com/rubyforgood/abalone

And utterly predictable - and nice to see - there is also https://pythonforgood.org/

These things sound delicious.

They are fantastic. If you ever get a chance, try it!

I don't think there's any saltwater invertebrate that isn't delicious when breaded and deep fried.

Wholly agree. Although I may take a pass on these guys if the opportunity presented itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_isopod

::shudders::

Edit: Update... Well somebody went there:

https://soranews24.com/2014/03/12/dinner-is-served-get-your-...

Is it really that different from a crab or a langoustine?

It does look alarmingly like a woodlouse/pillbug, but I'd guess the meat is quite similar.

They are. Abalone hoe is awesome

They are really tough and you need to pound the crap out of it. There are Asian restaurants where you can give a wink or secret handshake and get native abalone. Mostly Chinese IIRC. The Asian poachers were busted on a wildlife show I’ve watched and they are contributing to the problem. I heard about the Chinese restaurants in California from food blogs and other shows.

I saw a Chinese guy getting busted in NorCal he had hidden the abalone in the hub caps of his car tires. Think old Chevy ones that were like a big bowl.

This is the tragedy of the common resource, people always cheat. There will be no more fish in the sea. See the Canadian maritime fishing industry for exhibit A. They Take all the fish until there are no more and then try to find something new to do maybe, or maybe just do nothing.

Yea I’ve seen Chinese fisherman in Florida taking anything they catch. I mean anything their net or pole catches. Fish, not fish, invertebrate, even oyster toadfish. I wanted to see how they cook it all but some of the stuff was not legal.

Similar problem in Australia - lots of Chinese in Western Australia leads to overfishing of native Abalone stock: https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/the-ch...

Restrictions on fishing are getting tighter every season since more and more people go in

When I visited New Zealand's Stewart Island in 2005 to stay with my brother's in-laws (who run a sea food business there) I had the pleasure of a home cooked dinner of locally dive caught abalone and my own line caught blue cod. The abalone was cooked in garlic butter and was utterly delicious. I'm not really a huge fan of things that live in shells in the sea, but I could certainly get used to abalone.

Afterwards I was told that the (fairly sizeable) portion of abalone I'd consumed would have cost US$150+ in a US restaurant. I nearly fell off of my chair.

teh_klev says". The abalone was cooked in garlic butter and was utterly delicious. I'm not really a huge fan of things that live in shells in the sea, but I could certainly get used to abalone."

But anything cooked in garlic butter is utterly delicious! The abalone is merely a carrier for the hot garlic butter.

Well, yes I admit this is true. But the abalone had a nice texture, like nicely cooked mushrooms I guess. Having thought about it, it was actually like eating a really nice plate of foraged-in-the-wood mushrooms cooked in garlic butter but with a background taste that I couldn't properly identify (maybe the sea), but it wasn't unpleasant.

There's a red abalone farm just a couple of miles away from my house. I've never had white abalone though.

"Aquilino held up the abalone and looked square into its beady-eyed face.

“You,” she said, “are the future of your species.”"

If Abalone ever evolve, this might be the cause of a whole new religion. /s

I was instantaneously thinking about machine learning from UCI data set repository.

Talking about dangers of AI!

At first I thought it was about the Abalone board game and I was very confused.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_(board_game)

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