No Abalone Diving in California Until at Least 2021
from the January, 2019 issue of Undercurrent
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It's more bad news for California's abalone divers:
Already having missed a whole season in 2018,
they won't be able to go again for at least two more
years. Last month, the California Fish and Game
Commission (CFGC) decided to keep the state's recreational
abalone fishery closed through April 2021 to
give the shellfish population a chance to bounce back.
They based the decision on low density surveys from
key sites along the North Coast.
The season is usually open from April to
November for recreational diving north of San
Francisco, but has been limited in recent years and
was closed completely last year. The trouble really
began with the El Niño of 2014-16, which sparked
extreme environmental conditions for coastal environments:
a massive kelp die-off and exploding numbers
of purple sea urchins, which compete with abalone to
eat the bull kelp left the slow-growing sea snails starving
and not reproducing. Last year, the CFGC changed
the rules to allow recreational divers to take up to 20
gallons of purple sea urchins a day from the waters off
Sonoma and Mendocino Counties to see if that would
help in the recovery of the bull kelp and abalone. (In
one case, experienced divers used a vacuum device to
suck the creatures from the ocean floor.)...
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