California’s black abalone, a species of marine snail, faces challenges on the Big Sur coastline, home to one of the largest healthy populations of the creatures, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on its website.
Rain moving debris from steep cliffs on the coastline buries the snails, the agency said. California fires are another threat, causing a loss of vegetation that makes it easier for debris to flow into the snail's habitat.
"Monitoring endangered black abalone is exciting and important work," Steve Lonhart, a research ecologist for Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary said in a statement. "We never quite know what to expect when we head down to the intertidal, since it is such a dynamic environment. This kind of monitoring allows us to track black abalone survival and better understand sediment movement that is still happening, months after the original debris flows.”
"This species experienced major population declines caused by a lethal disease known as withering syndrome, which spread throughout its entire range," the agency said. "The black abalone was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in 2009."
In 2020, a fire burned in Big Sur for more than four months, destroying 125,000 acres. In January, 15 inches of rain in less than three days washing enormous amounts of dirt, rocks and trees onto the shore where the snails live.
Researchers recovered buried black abalone that were still alive, NOAA said.
According to the agency, black abalone are only native to the western coast of North America, from just north of San Francisco in California to Bahia Tortugas and Isla Guadalupe in Baja, Mexico.
