On a summer day, local fishermen mend their fishing lines in Monterey, California, while tourists wander along the wooden pier trying to spot the sea otters playing in Monterey Bay. Most don’t realize that just below their feet, under the wharf, is a successful aquaculture operation. Aquaculture is the growing of aquatic animals and plants in controlled environments for commercial reasons.
The Monterey Abalone Company raises abalone, which is like a muscle or an oyster, and it is grown both for its beautiful shell and taste, which is exceptionally good. Meanwhile, way out at the very end of the local Wharf in Monterey, Art Seavey descends through a trapdoor, walks on a handmade network of slippery wooden planks and pulls a rope to hoist a dripping wire cage up from the ocean, just as he does every other day.
This was a once-abundant food source on the Central Coast that is now so rare the state has banned commercial abalone fishing, in an attempt to help stocks recover. That’s why Seavey and business partner Trevor Fay farm California Red abalone instead, in a unique partnership since 1992 with the city of Monterey, allowing growing cages suspended underneath the pier. Red abalone is the largest and most common abalone in Northern California.
Steps had to be taken when it became obvious that it was getting harder and harder to fish as they had done in the past. The stocks just weren’t there. All the affected parties met to discuss ways in which the situation could be reversed and this was their solution. How successful they will be remains to be seen, but for the moment there is optimism. The abalone must be at least ten centimetres in diameter to be sold. It takes approximately four years for them to grow to regulation size. To get that big, they have to eat a lot. Each week, workers go out in a skiff to collect nearly 3 tons of giant kelp.
The creatures reach out with their muscular foot to pull the seaweed under their shell and toward their mouth, where a long, file-like tongue grinds it into a size they can swallow. When Russian hunters in the 1800s destroyed the sea otter population, the abalone the otters once ate became very common in shallow tidal areas. Chinese fishing families, who arrived on the Monterey Peninsula, immediately recognized a business opportunity.
In 1908, Monterey restaurateur Ernest Doelter saw what they were doing and got inspired. He started pounding the abalone and invented what is now known as the abalone steak. Now, that same steak is highly prized in high-end restaurants. Monterey Abalone Co. ships about 60,000 live abalone a year within the United States. Most of its restaurant clients are in Los Angeles, Monterey and the Bay Area.
The iridescent shells are also sold for a dollar or two apiece, and the farm recently took an order for 800 pounds of kelp from an alternative energy researcher.