NOAA’s California Veterans Corps program, providing post-9/11 veterans with opportunities to protect fisheries resources, is now engaged in restoring abalone along the California coast.
While NOAA’s California Veterans Corps members are typically deployed to local streams to help restore and monitor endangered and threatened salmon and steelhead, lately they’ve taken on another mission - restoring endangered White abalone. Veterans Corps members have been supporting NOAA’s work on a pilot effort building short-term abalone fixed enclosures, or SAFEs.
White abalone, a NOAA Species in the Spotlight are endangered gastropods, sea snails, that have an iconic California history. Recently an important part of commercial and recreational fisheries, and subsistence fishing for native Americans for thousands of years prior, their populations declined steeply in the 1990s. Now they’re listed as endangered because of overfishing, disease and other threats.
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Image via NOAA