Abalone Boom and Bust
Historical Essay
by David D. Schmidt, 2026
An excerpt from the book, San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History, by David D. Schmidt (Backcountry Press, 2025).
Abandoned Chinese Abalone fishing village near Pacific Grove near Monterey, c. 1900.
Photo: USC Libraries
“Abalone” sounds like “baloney,” but it’s not a lunchmeat. It’s the only word of an Ohlone tribal language that was adopted into Spanish and then English. Abalone are hand-sized (or bigger) mollusks, relatives of snails that cling to submerged rocks along the California Coast. In the late 1800s, Chinese immigrants harvested them from coastal tidepools. Nobody else wanted them. In the 1879-80 fishing season Chinese abalone hunters in the Bay Area processed 150,000 pounds of abalone meat, most of it sun-dried for export to China. They also collected 950,000 pounds of shells, worth about twice as much as the meat. The smooth interiors, known as “mother-of-pearl” (though abalones don’t make pearls), were carved to make buttons and jewelry.
Abalone fishermen Pierce Brothers in Morro Bay, c. 1900.
Photo: "Hidden History of Abalone in Morro Bay.
The state banned the drying and export of abalone meat in 1913—but only in the Bay Area, where Chinese people were numerous, and abalone were becoming scarce, hitting a low of only 225 pounds harvested in 1919. Commercial take was banned in the region for 17 of the 20 years between 1922 and 1942, allowing abalone to replenish their rocky coastal habitats. During the two-year abalone boom that followed, in 1944-45, commercial divers took 679,000 pounds—causing an immediate abalone bust. Commercial take of abalone in California has been banned since the 1960s; all take has been illegal south of the Golden Gate since 1997.
After that, only crowbar-carrying recreational abalone hunters were allowed to free-dive (without SCUBA gear), to pry red abalone from submerged offshore rocks north of the Marin/Sonoma County line. The Department of Fish and Wildlife (formerly DFG) closed even that fishery in 2017, due to the collapse of the North Coast abalone population, triggered by sea star wasting syndrome in 2013-15, and a marine heat wave from 2014 to 2016. The disease wiped out the sunflower sea star, which eats purple sea urchins. Without the sea star, the urchins multiplied 60-fold, eating that much more kelp, which is also the abalone’s food. Then the marine heat wave decimated the remaining kelp forests, while causing reproductive failure in abalone. Without kelp, the abalone starved. By 2019, only 4% of the original (2010) population survived.(1) Cooler waters returned in 2017, but the kelp forests didn’t, until 2021, when the kelp partially recovered.(2) Since it takes years for an abalone to grow from an egg to maturity, the DFW extended the closure of abalone hunting until 2026.
Urchin barrens surrounds one red abalone.
Photo: Katie Sowul, California Department of Fish and Wildlife
Closeup of underwater bull kelp before decimation.
Photo: Kevin Joe, California Department of Fish and Wildlife
Questions? Email the author: davidnaturesf@gmail.com
Notes:
1. Kerlin, Kat, “California’s crashing kelp forest,” UC Davis Climate News, Oct. 21, 2019.
2. Bland, Alastair, “Kelp Forests Surge Back on Parts of North Coast,” baynature.org (Bay Nature Magazine), Sept. 13, 2021.
Excerpted from David D. Schmidt's San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History. Available from Backcountry Press.