Abalone divers and shoreline pickers will need to wait until at least 2021 to legally harvest abalone again.

At a meeting in Oceanside on Wednesday, the California Fish and Game Commission decided to keep the state recreational abalone fishery closed through April 2021. The fishery, which was also closed in 2018, was usually open from April to November each year.

Stillwater Cove, Sonoma County

The Commission based its decision on low population density surveys in key sites along the North Coast in Sonoma and Mendocino counties. The population density tool is used by biologists to measure the health of the abalone population from key sites along the North Coast.

The state also would lose more than $1 million in projected revenue from abalone card sales over the two-year period.

From 2010-2015, divers harvested an average of 240,000 abalone each year. One of the most popular areas in Mendocino County, Van Damme State Park, reported an average of 16,488 abalone taken each year. About 25,000 abalone hunters fished the coastline each year.

RAAC members and the public attend the Nov. 5, 2016 meeting in Cotati, CA to discuss the upcoming season and challenges facing the north coast abalone population.

The tide shifted for recreational abalone divers beginning about five years ago, partly due to an unusual disease that killed millions of sea stars, which prey on sea urchins. Without their key predator in place, the sea urchin population multiplied rapidly. As their numbers exploded, the kelp forests on which both abalone and sea urchins depend were literally stripped clean along California’s northern coastline. As a result of starvation, large numbers of abalone have died, and those still alive have stopped growing and reproducing due to the environmental stress.

According to Sonke Mastrup, environmental program manager at the invertebrate program of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, “conditions have only gotten worse since the 2017 surveys”.

Concerned recreational and commercial divers have tried to help the abalone this year by targeting threatened areas and harvesting thousands of sea urchins. Diver collected more than 57 tons or urchins along the Sonoma and Mendocino coasts – an effort welcomed by State commissioners, who are expected to give another boost to those efforts Wednesday, increasing harvest limits on purple urchins.