announcer: on this episode of "earth focus," ocean acidification caused by global warming is dramatically affecting marine life. in california, partnerships are forming between cocommercial fisheries, scientists, and community members to helelp the endangered abalone adapt and survive. [slide projector clicking] different announcer: "earth focus" is made possible in part by a grant from anne ray foundation, a margaret a.

cargill philanthropy; the orange county community foundation; and the farvue foundation. [surf crashing] [distant chahatter] man: it was a big thing. it was a big tradition for generations, you know, just, for me, as 3 generarations. i k know some l s that are 4th generation of really kind of rock-picking and then evolving into diving and harvesting the abalone. and it's just--it's an incredible opportunity. it's--the ocean's free to go into. there's education, there's science, there's a physical workout. it's really just sort of a magical... opportrtunity, reaeally a rich t of a lot of f the locals' lives here. abalone brouought a lot of people here e that--it was the big vacation of the year. cocome

over with, you know, mom, dad, and the grandkids and camp out and relive the memories that they had when theyere children. womaman: abalone is a hot topic across california because the harvest of abalone is deeply embedded in the e culture of californians, going back to indigenous communities that lived here before our cocolonizationon. doug b bush: it's just l like a garden snail, exceptpt instead f eating y your basil l and your littttle baby ararugula starar's eating seaweweed. one shell anda foot. this is what you eat. this isis just a bibig, muscular foot that it crawls aroround and hols onto the rock. krisistin aquilinono: abalone ha reallyly importantnt economic it on this statate. they y supporta lulucrative cocommercial fisherr decades. they also supported a recreatitional fishery that brought about $45 million to the north coast of california until recently, and they support realally sustaininable aquaculte inin the statete.

woman: the red abalone fishery was a major fishery, recreational fishery on the north coast for decacades and ae really critical for the culture of california for r that time. we had to recommend to the fish and game commission that it be closed after several years of severe impacts to the kelp forest. lackey: it's definitely affected business, and my tours have been greatly y affected f for the abb diving. and they estimate that it's, you k know, anywhere from $44 to $5454 million out of ourr local economy, just from the abalone, a and that really hurt. wiwith businesess down, yoyou k, considerabably, ss than 50%, it's almost at a break-even popoint for meme. i'm hanging in there. i'm still dodoing it. the economy is on everyone. you know, the gas stations, the markets, the hotels, state parks.

cattonon: we've been susurveyine kelp foresest for the e last 20 years s now. we've seen n a seve decline of the kelp forest and severe impact to t the algal communities, and those are directly impacacting the abalone fishery because the abalone rely on the kelelp for food. so w w'e had 4 years of severe starvation conditions for abalone and other herbivores in the system, and we're seeing evidence of mass mortalitieies of the a abalone n the wild. so the kelp forest has declined dramatically, basically, because of this run of incredibly warm water we've had on the california coast. basically, you know, the warmest the california coast has gotten in recent history for the longest periodod of time. . so that is e first symptom of broader global change that we are expecting along the california coast. catton: ththis is what it lookos lilike to be u underwater in a l kelp foresest. this is what we

used to survey through, and today, where we are seeing this vast expanse of no bull kelp, the culmination of these--this persistent starvation is, in papart, due to an expapansion oe purple urcrchin population. and purple u urchins are a natural part of the system. we're seeing these urchins, which are little balls of spines, basically, with a mouth on the bottom that will start to form feeding fronts and mow down everything that they come across on the reef. lackey: it really started to change quickly. we saw a a lot more purple urchins.s. the kelp started to not look as healthy. we really starteted seeing the last k kelp, more urchins, a ani think there e were a lot of peoe surprised.d. man: when wewe started this urcn removal project, it was really small. it was justst a few peope

that really wanted t to do something about the e urchin explplosion because the dedepart hadn't been doing anything. we removed 57 totons of purple urchchins, between the recreational a and the commercil didivers. our program is now wht i considerer a success, ok, soso give youourselves a big round of applausese, please. [cheering] this event basically was spawned by the closure of abalonee seasons. you know,w, thebb seasons were closed d due to the lack of f kelp and t the incread nunumber of ururchin t that were preventing the kelp from coming up. so, you know, basically, our bebest chance e of gettingnn abalonone fishery y back is toto something g about the e urchin firsrst. there''s no way to prec what'll happen. things change, but t a lot of t the things s te know, a lot ofof the busininesss that wknow are i in threat, are in danger of closing now, and as this p progresses more, will ben danger of closing. you know, the commercial fisheheries, the recreational fisisheries--if therere's no kelp, there's no fish.

cacatton: one of the thihings tt the watermrmen's alliance is s g to help progress our goals is to engagage the ababalone diverersd other r recreationonal divers se area that are passionate about helping g to bring back the kelp forestst, to target the purple urchins in t their recreational harvest. [overlapapping chatttter] russo: in 2013, there was an abnormal spawning event with the purple urchin in sonoma, where they spawned in deep water and it washed ashore, basically the entire sonoma coast. so what happened then is you have the kelp trying to come back in the cold-water years, but in an abnormally large population of purple urchin. so every time the kelp would pop up, it was dog-piled by urchin, so there's an urgency to o getting this doe sooner rather than latater. catton: so we're here to estimate the number, the totalal numbers of urchihins that are

being caughtht. we're taking a look at the sizes of those urchins and looking at wtt their condition is, what they''e been eatating. man: i thihink the big thingng s that thehey--younonow, when thee kekelp comes back, when n the kp come back, that'll bringng ththe abs back. man 2: i'veve been out t here dg for abalone for decades, a we'veve got thirdrd and fourtrth generatition coming up that we want t to presererve all thihisr themem and for e everyone elelst to mention the econonomy out he. it just--it's a very special place, and t to have the indnduy brings a lot of moneney to the economomy, ande'e'd like t to se ththis economy built back up. man: a and it's emotional, you know? bebecause herere--this is where i learned d to abalone-di, you knknow, back i in 1999, you knowow, and to see what's happed to i it is, yeahah, it's really- it's really hard to look at. catton: it's s a really community-building kind of event, and it's really fabulous to see so many people energized and engaged with helping to restore e the kelp f forest. man 3: because thihis is our playayground. wewe love thisis.s

is--when you're talkingng about environmentalism, you're talking of people who come outut there d we play, w we love this place. e dodon't wawant to see e it hurte want to o have sometething tha's renewable e and sustaiainable. % of all the abalone n now in mendococino are dedead because they''ve starved to dedeath. wo, 95% of allll the abalone in sona county are dead. we will nevever dive there again. man 4: it's... it's bebeyond words just how bad it's gotten. [water bubbling] aquilino: so here's an abalone. it's got--you know, it just looks like a garden snail in these respiratory wateters here. this is number 037. abalone are

basically just like a big suction cup with an adorable face. we are now in the white abalone captive breeding lab. this is s a really exciting plpe where try to mamake the bababi, the baby white abalone t that wl be t the animals that go o out n the wild and help save the species. so these guysn these troughs were just booted out of the nursery over there behind you because that's where we're going to senend all the e new animals that we prododuce this yeyear, and these are alall thes ththat we produced in 2018, in all--this whole rack. and i can pull up a really tiny one and put it on my finger. swezey: and these guys a are all the same age, right? aquilino: they're all the same age, so it's rereally amazing te size variation that we see in these animals. there's a lot of genetic variation in abalone, and ththat's good news in some ways, when we think about climatate change because thehere might bebe a lot of genetic adaptations that t they have tht natural selection can act on. we're helicopter parents to every one. swswezey: yeah, every white abalone is sacred in this lab.

so our resesearch has s been fod on basic impacts on abalone,e, t beyond that, what drives variation n in that reresponse? because in ourur experiments, we've seen some pretty negative impacts, but then we've seen some abalone that don't seem as affected, that grow more or less normally. soso what is it about those indidividuals? when n youe these big g impacts inin other , what is it aboutut the guys s tt are makingng it? what t in their genetics is s allowing t them to that? and ththen could w we hars that information t that we're discoverining to basically build reresilience i into conserervind grgrowing the species inin the future? aquilino: our first year of getting this program here at uc dadavis bodega m marine laborat, we only had about t 30 total animals in captivivity. our fift spawning season, we e created about 20 m more. that t wasn't g to save ththe species,s, but the next y year, we crcreated about, the e year after that, a few thousand, and in this room, wewe have about 30,000 white abalone, well over what is left in the wild. we want as many as possible to survive in order to

ensure the future of this species. hill: krisistin aquilino is thee lead scientist whoho has been charged with trying to bring the endangered white a abalone back from the brinknk of extinction. the prproject has bebeen remarky susuccessful, , but an intntereg thing g to think a about is thte knowow that abalalone who araret free out into o the ocean n tody are actualally going to experiee a different ocean in their lifetime than perhaps the abalone of 50 or a hundred years ago. and so papart of what krisn is thinkining about is, what d s the fufuture hold for those whie abalone in the ocean? and part of that future is ocean acidificatioion. ocean acidification is a particularly interesesting scientific p problem because i's fufundamentalllly the chananging chemistry of the o ocean due to risingng carbon dioxide concentratation in the atmosphee because of human activities.

when we talk about global warmrming, we're usualally talkg about chchanges in t the average temperature across the earth's surface, associated with that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. the cause of global warming is the same cause of oceaean acidification, so rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere also causeses the oceanan to fundamentally change in chemistry. in 2007, our research group formed, anand there are a groupf faculty whwho work together to y to understanand the impacts of ocean acidificication, and the reason whyhy is that we e know e ocean is a tremendouous sponge r carbrbon. it just soaks itit upo about 20% to 30% of f what we et to the a atmosphere through ouor activities ends up in the ocean, and that fundamentally changes

the chemistry of the ocean water. i it reduces the ph of fe water, making g it more acidic, shififting it enough thatt organisms absolutely notice anad are e impacted. we arere asking really fundadaml things a about how a animals ine sea workrk, how they make shele, hohow they live, and how these chemicical changes might affectt all of thohose things.s. i'm using a probe right now to memeasure the tempmperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and ph of f the seawater out here in the cove. we do things like this routinely y both here, but all p and down the california coast to try to understand how processes likeke ocean acicidificationon d clclimate change are hapappening along this coast.

swezeyey: so what we'rere doings wewe're m measuring t the ph of seawater using this device atat's s called a spectrophotometer. basically how it works i is we add a little bt of dye t to seawater, thisis dye that's called creresol purple, d it actctually cocomplexewiwith hydrogen ion in thseseawater, so itit basicallyly changes c colon proportion to o the ph o of that seawater, and it ususually kindf goes from a purple t to a red. e then put iin this mamachine and wewe shine ligight through that seawater, and depending on the cololor, the macachine is abablo calculate the exact ph of that seawater. the average phph of te ocean is about 8.1. we're expecting it to o decline about another .2 to .3 units, possibly more. yoyou may not t think that thatat is an incncredibly imimpt detail, but it actually turns out that animals in the ocean have evolved in a pretty stable ph, that the magnitude of change we''re expxpecting is s much grr

than thehey've s seen in anyny t evolutionary period of time. aquilino: all of the caldera instruments come back tomorrow.. swezezey: oh. hill: so this place will be huhummin' startg g this weekend. swezey: ok. hill: we werere particulularly intereststed in spececies alonge west coast of the u.s. that people would really identify as sosort of classic c west-coast species. a and so we b began thinking about ocean acidification impacting abalone and other species that m many people on the west coast, if you're walking along a shore, they're the species that youu think ofof as being sort of characacteristically what yoyou would find on this shore. when an abalone or a clam is making its shell, it is essentially pulling components out of the water. it's pulling building blocks out of the water and making a hard part. and what ocean acidification does is it makes it harder for them to find those building blocks, so they

expend more energy just trying to make a shell to protect themselves from a predator or a crashingng wave or whatever the ocean n is bringing. swezey: we're realizing that animals that build shells and hard parts take calcium and carbonate out of the water and build skeletons with it. the calcium carbonate is very sensitive to the ph of seawater, that it's less stable as seawater becomeses more acididi, and wewe've begun to realizize t it's much harder r for animals o build ththeir bodies in the firt place and kindnd of maintain wht they already have, and t that there's s a bunch of sensitivits when they're very little. when they're kind of first grorowing, theyey're actually very dependet on a stable ph of the ocean. aquilino: white abalone are an ideal specieies to be looking at some of these questions about ococean acidification bebecause they're a a deepwater species.. they're oftften in water that is naturally momore acidic than soe of the surrounding w water, ando if w we can fire out howow they deal with thisis problem, we mit be able to applyly that to other abalone species that are also

facing peril. [surf crashing] swezey: : i met doug bush, whohs the general manager of t the cucultured abalone farm,m, whene cameme up here to give a s semi. the whitite abalone e breeding program m here has really beenen infoformed by a lot of the stuff he's done with his commercial business in santa barbara on the kind of technique for raising the larvae, how you grow them out, how you raise a lot in a vevery small s space. thatat's l informatioion that's incredediby imimportant toto abalone coervation.. bush: there'e's a rereally strog dedemand domescalllly.lmosost al of our product is sold in california or just on the west coast. we do everything in-house. we're a completely integrated farm. we have adult abalone, which we'll take e into the hatchery, and you get a tiny littlele fertilized abalone embrbryo. we getet them by the

millllions. 24 houours laterer,y hatch, a and feed, feed, feed,d, repeat, and harvest at about 100 grams, about a a 3 1/2-incnch sl length. and thatat's ththe markt size, and we crank those out 52 weeks a year. aquilino: much of what we dodo here in thisis program has been inspired by y what abalone farms do, people like e doug bush and dan swezeyey at the cucultured abalone fafarm have rereally hed usus figure out how to maximize productition in this lab. so we take their best methods and then we tweak them for whwhite abalo, so it rereally helps sustainable aquaculture in this countrtry ad the restoration of a species. bush: i've b been banging this drum for a while, , to really st of d draw attentntion to ababal. itit's jujust a perfefect, bannr species. a aquaculturere and mae scscience has s a tendencycy tot of do a real cut-a-and-paste s e of research, and so it didn't seem to me to be a great way to

nenecessarily advance ththe bodf knowleledge on howow you can e t change and keep ththat learninig trajectory movining forward. whn we have a sort of reready supply of something, , where you can, like, generate the numbers you need for replicatable research, and you can kind of foster that commercial and r research partnership, dan really jumped on that. you know, he and i met, and he took up that cause enthusiastically. swezey: and ultimately, to restore white abalone in the wild, we're going to need the scale that we see at commercial abalone farms because we're going to have to put them out by the hundreds of thousands to the millions if we ever want t to se that population kind of restored to its--its kind of pre-impact populalation in southern cacalifornia. hill: they are interested in sort of--if we look toward the future of the farming of abalone, what can wewe do to mae susure that ththose abalone are hehealthy and d resilient t to e

ocean conditionsns? but they are also lookiking at whether particular g genetic strains mit be more resilient to thesese future condititions. bush: when they're this size, they're relatively burly. they're capable of withstanding challenges, esespecially short-term ones. where we are, on the coast, the--the big acidification events, the big ph drops, they're associated with upupwelling evevents, and they't last forever. they canan--these guys can d deal with thosese, bt the larvae, the eggs, the future of these guys--those guys get hit by those events, and it just hammers them. it's gotten challenging. it's not a turnkey, pushbutttton operation to justst themem in the bucket and make a million babies, you knowow? andt should be, but it's gettining hardrder and harder and haharder everery year. swezey: doug really takes it a

step further in that he's willing g to work wiwith scients and groups thahat are interested in conservrving the species on a more personal level l because he understands the e value in conserving the abalone and having a healthy abalone population both for his business, but alsoso for kind df the historical legacy of the state. he really wants to see abalone continue in the future, and that's what we all want. hill: yoyou know, wowow, what an opportunity y we have, an ocean acidification researarch group here a at the maririne lab. wewe anan expert onon bringing an endangereded white ababalone sps back f from the brbrink, and w e anan expert onon farming red abe inin the context of oceaean acididification,n, and so, o of course, ouour 3 groupsps work together because we're interested in trying to understandnd the futurure of alf these spspecies, both for conservation of the species--how do we protect the species in the future?--but also for sustainable farmrming.

bush: the academic world moves at its own pace.e. in the commercial world, we're--it moves at its own pace, but there are momentnts and there are projects t that bring everyone into the folold and let t the is kind of flow. it's vevery organ. it's the way that thinknking works, t the way that problem-sosolving workrks, the y that youou approach h a problemm a didifferent peperspective sometimes, take e a step bacack. whwhen you're working on a project, you d develop the commmmunity thatat helps you moe forward. swezey: nonow we are at this pot where the knowledgdge that's ben accumulateted here on n abalone farms like this s is actuallllya valuabable resourcrce, and it'sa criticalal step in conserving ge species in many ways, not only from a technical standpoint, but also from what was achieved, starting the farm inin the first place and gettining these animas to persist, and d so, in that sense, i it is a valuable resose frfrom the yeaears and years of effort to build this place.

rurusso: i thihink that ththe tr diversrs to be pasassive and t t regulations happen and to lelet ththings like ththat happen andd believe ththat nobody's s goingo shut youour fishery y down, i tk thatat's ovover. i thinink we s- i ththink everybody should b be involved.. lackey: pepeople wouldld come up with no exexperience, , and we'e able to o take them m out in the wateter, and mosost of them m we pretty successful. i mean, they thought it was thehe greatest thing in the world, they were super impressed d with how many abs there were. but unfortunately, the niche hasn't been filled.d. the abalone is-- with that gone, there's a missing business component for sure. i'm hopeful that those oaoasises are e going to be fif, they're going to help the spawn come back in the abalone populationon, and hopepefully we just get back on t track. [surf crashingng]

swswezey: and d that the o oceas been this, you know, incredible resourcece and source of nourishmenent for me; ; you kno, rerecreation, wonderment, stimulating my interest in the natural world,d, and kind of driving what i do, so there's no going somewhere else or eating whatat's left. this i is our shd legacy, our sharared resource, and so that's what i bring to w what i do.. hill: many of us have some sort of relationship with the ocean. maybe it's through things that we like to eat or places that we like to visit, or even long-standing cultural traditions or values that we have around a healthy ocean and a healthy beach that we want to go visit. and so there isn't actually a, you know, a magic message from the past to telells what's going to happen because this great human experiment that

we have embarked upon is a much larger problem than the geologic record can tell us about. annonouncer: "earth focus" is me possible in part by a grant from anne ray foundation, a margaret a. cargill philanthropy; the orange county community foundatition; and the farvue fououndation. is d

afternoon if we get started here my name is hector sanchez flores and i represent the national composite is network. i'm humbled to be here to introduce your next speaker. a man that i've known for nearlrly twenty five years but whose work is a protein- over forty years of dedication to community. maestro jury today on- if you don't if you've never met him i'll share with you a few items that i think that. rarely get highlighted. about his work- he's connected to and what drives his passion and his mission as i've observed over twenty five years. it's connected to a wonderful partner susie army hall