The Call of the Abalone

Humans have been drawn to abalone for at least thirteen thousand years. Along the northern coast of the Golden State, Indigenous Californians like the Miwok and Pomo tribes harvested abalone for food. From their iridescent, radiant shells, they fashioned tools and shards for ceremonial dress, the light playing against the ever-changing mother-of-pearl of which their shells are composed.

The abalone population boomed along the northern Sonoma coast during the mid-1800s, when Russian fur trappers began harvesting sea otters, the abalone’s main predator. With abalone numbers growing in abundance, Chinese and American fishermen began collecting them in shallow waters, so much so that by 1900, the first regulations were placed upon abalone fishing, and the first popular fishery was closed. Soon after, Japanese divers started aggressively harvesting subtidal abalone by hard-hat and free diving. Populations were suddenly threatened, and size restrictions were imposed: no abalone smaller than 15 inches (38 centimeters) in circumference could be harvested. Over the decades, though, the sea otter population improved, and the abalone population stabilized, sustaining commercial operations and abalone divers alike.

Frank Lambert, who grew up along the Sonoma coast, began harvesting abalone in 1959, when he was just five years old. “We’d head down to the old Red Barn; that’s what locals called it. But it’s better known as the Pedotti Dairy. The Pedottis were friends with my grandparents.”

The Pedotti Ranch was located just south of Fort Ross and, at the time, was a Jersey dairy. “For twenty-five cents, you could walk down to the rocks and harvest up to ten abalone a person. It was amazing.” Though he was too young to dive at the time, Frank was able to extract abalone from beneath large rocks along the shoreline. “And I’d help the divers out. We didn’t have neoprene in those days, so I’d hand them talcum powder so they could get their wet suits on.”

When he was older, Frank began abalone diving and continued diving along the Jenner Grade, all the way up to Sea Ranch and Fort Ross, until a moratorium was placed on any form of abalone harvesting and diving along the northern Sonoma coast in 2017. “There’s word they may reopen in a few years, but that’s still up in the air,” he says.

Beneath its hard shell, the abalone is a fragile and delicate creature. They are essentially hemophiliacs, the smallest cut resulting in their bleeding out and perishing. This makes it hard to farm them. Red abalone are more easily farmed than white abalone, but even the red abalone fisheries have closed. Abalone are highly sensitive to their environment. Like canaries in a coal mine, they’re immediately impacted by their environment. Today, their greatest predator is our species. Warming ocean temperatures due to climate change have caused the sea urchin population to increase dramatically along the California coastline. Sea urchins eat kelp forests, and their dramatic numbers have transformed once-rich kelp ecosystems into barren maritime deserts.

Kelp forests provide shelter and food for various sea creatures, including abalone, who need cold water to thrive. In 2016, an El Niño event caused water temperatures to rise dramatically. That, coupled with overharvesting, led to a moratorium the following year.

Frank, now 64, continues to fish for cabezon off the Sonoma coast. It’s his favorite kind of rockfish, and he recently joined a charter not far from his home in Guerneville. “When we were kids, we used abalone guts as bait. The fish loved that,” Frank says.

He remains optimistic that abalone season may reopen. When asked if he’d dive for abalone again if the moratorium were lifted, he responds enthusiastically, “Heck yes! To me, it’s the most delicious food in the world.”