Red Abalone

• It is the largest abalone in the world: its shell reaches 31 cm.
• People have used it for millennia. At sites on California's Channel Islands, shells have been dated to between 11,500 and 12,000 years old, and they are abundant in Chumash shell middens from 7,500 to 3,300 years ago.
• The Californian commercial fishery peaked in the 1950s and 1960s and closed in 1997; the recreational one held on until 2017 or 2018.
• Its closure was not down to overfishing alone: a marine heatwave set off a chain reaction — the disappearance of the sea stars, an explosion of purple urchins, the collapse of the kelp forest — that left the abalone without food.
• It is also affected by withering syndrome, caused by a rickettsia-like bacterium that attacks the digestive system and makes the foot waste away until the animal can no longer grip the rock.
• The export of infected red abalone from California has carried that disease to Iceland, Ireland, Chile, China, Israel and Japan.

Habitat & environment

Kelp-forest rock in the low intertidal and subtidal of California and Baja California, down to about 180 m; it clamps onto the rock with its foot and feeds on the drifting kelp it catches

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haliotis_rufescens