announcer: on this episode of "earth focus," ocean acidification caused by global warming is dramatically affecting marine life. in california, partnerships are forming between commercial fisheries, scientists, and community members to help 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 chatter] man: it was a big thing. it was a big tradition for generations, you know, just, for me, as 3 generations. i know some locals 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... opportunity, really a rich part of a lot of thlocals' lives here. abale brought lot of people here that--it was their

big vacation of the year. come over with, you know, mom, dad, and the grandkids and camp out and relive the memories that they had when they were children. woman: abalone is a hot topic across california because the harvest of abalone is deeply embedded in the culture of californians, going back to indigenous communities that lived here before our colonization. doug bush: it's just like a garden snail, except instead of eating your basil and your little baby arugula starts, it's eating seaweed. one shell and a foot. this is what you eat. this is just a big, muscular foot that it crawls arod and holds onto the rock. kristin aquilino: abalone have a really important economic impact on this state. they supported a lucrative commercial fishery for decades. they also supported a recreational fishery that brought about $45 million to the north coast of california until recently, and they support really sustainable aquaculture

in the state. woman: the red abalone fishery was a major fishery, recreational fishery on the north coast for decades and are really critical for the culture of california for that te. 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 affected for the ab diving. and they estimate that it's, you know, anywhere from $44 to $54 million out of our local economy, just from the abalone, and that really hurt. with business down, you know, considerably, less than 50%, it's almost at a break-even point for me. i'm hanging in there. i'm still doing it. the economy is on everyone. you know, the gas stations, the markets, the hels,

state parks. catton: we've been surveying the kelp forest for the last 20 years now. we've seen a severe decline of the kelp forest and severe impact to the algal communities, and those are directly impacting the abalone fishery because the abalone rely on the kelp for food. so we've had 4 years of severe starvation conditions for abalone and other herbivores in the system, and we're seeing evidence of mass mortalities of the abalone in 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 period of time. so that is the first symptom of broader global change that we are expecting along the california coast. catton: this is what it looks like to be underwater in a bull

kelp fores 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 part, due to an expansion of the purple urchin population. and purple 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 lot more purple urchins. the kelp started to not look as healthy. we really started seeing the last kelp, more urchins, and i think there were a lot of people surprised. man: when we started this urchin removal project, it was really

small. it was just a few people that really wanted to do something about the urchin explosion because the department hadn't been doing anything. we removed 57 tons of purple urchins, between the recreational and the commercial divers. our program is now what i consider a success, ok, so give yrselves a big round of applause, please. [cheering] this event basically was spawned by the closure of abalone seasons. you know, the ab seasons were closed due to the lack of kelp and the increased number of urchin that were preventing the kelp from coming up. so, you know, basically, our best chance of getting an abalone fishery back is to do something about the urchin first. there's no way to predict what'll happen. things change, but a lot of the things that we know, a lot of the businesses that we know are in threat, are in danger of closing now, and as this progresses more, will be in danger of closing. you know, the commercial fisheriesthe recreational fisheries--if there's no kelp, there's

no fish. catton: one of the things that the watermen's alliance is doing to help progress our goals is to engage the abalone divers and other recreational divers in the area that are passionate about helping to bring back the kelp forest, to target the purple urchins in their recreational harvest. [overlapping chatter] 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 getting this done sooner rather than later. catton: so we're here to estimate the number, the total

numbers of urchins that are being caught. we're taking a look at the sizes of those urchins and looking at what their condition is, what they've been eating. man: i think the big things that they--you know, when the kelp comes back, when the kelp come back, that'll bring the abs back. man 2: i've been out here diving for abalone for decades, and we've got third and fourth generation coming up that we want to preserve all this for them and for everyone else, not to mention the economy out here. it just--it's a very special place, and to have the industry brings a lot of money to the economy, and we'd like to see this economy built back up. man: and it's emotional, you know? because here--this is where i learned to abalone-dive, you know, back in 1999, you know, and to see what's happened to it is, yeahit's really-- it's really hard to look at. catton: it'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 the kelp forest.

man 3: because this is our playground. we love this. this is--when you're talking about environmentalism, you're talking of people who come out there and we play, we love this place. we don't want to see it hurt. we want to have something that's renewable and sustainable. 70% of all the abalone now in mendocino are dead because they've starved to death. worse, 95% of all the abalone in sonoma county are dead. we will never dive there again. man 4: it's... it's beyond 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 waters 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 a really exciting place where we try to make the babies, the baby white abalone that will be the animals that go out in the wild and help save the species. so these guys in these troughs were just booted out of the nursery over there behind you because that's where we're going to send all the new animals that we produce this year, and these are all the ones that 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 are all the same age, right? aquilino: they're all the same age, so it's really amazing the size variation that we see in these animals. there's a lot of genetic variation in abalone, and that's good news in some ways, when we think about climate change because there might be a lot of genetic adaptations that they have that natural selection can act on. we're helicopter parents to every one. swezey: yeah, every white abalone is sacred in this lab.

so our research has been focused on basic impacts on abalone, but beyond that, what drives variation in that response? because in our 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. so what is it about those individuals? when you see these big impacts in other guys, what is it about the guys that are making it? what in their genetics is allowing them to do that? and then could we harness that information that we're discovering to basically build resilience into conserving and growing the species in the future? aquilino: our first year of getting this program here at uc davis bodega marine laboratory, we only had about 30 total animals in captivity. our first spawning season, we created about 20 more. that wasn't going to save the species, but the next year, we created about 120, the year after that, a few thousand, and in this room, we 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: kristin aquilino is the lead scientist who has been charged with trying to bring the endangered white abalone back from the brink of extinction. the project has been remarkably successful, but an interesting thing to think about is that we know that abalone who are set free out into the ocean today are actually going to experience a different ocean in their lifetime than perhaps the abalone of 50 or a hundred years ago. and so part of what kristin is thinking about is, what does the future hold for those white abalone in the ocean? and part of that future is ocean acidification. ocean acidification is a particularly interesting scientific problem because it's fundamentally the changing chemistry of the ocean due to rising carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere

because of human activities. when we talk about global warming, we're usually talking about changes in 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 ocean acidification, so rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere also causes the ocean to fundamentally change in chemistry. in 2007, our research group formed, and there are a group of faculty who work together to try to understand the impacts of ocean acidification, and the reason why is that we know the ocean is a tremendous sponge for carbon. it just soaks it up, so about 20% to 30% of what we emit to the atmosphere through our activities ends up in the ocean,

and that fundamentally changes the chemistry of the ocean water. it reduces the ph of the water, making it more acidic, shifting it enough that organisms absolutely notice and are impacted. we are asking really fundamental things about how animals in the sea work, how th make shells, how they live, and how these chemic changes might affect all of those things. i'm using a probe right now to measure the temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and ph of the seawater out here in the cove. we do things like this routinely both here, but all up and down the california coast to try to understand how processes like ocean acidification and climate change are happening

along this coast. swezey: so what we're doing is we're measuring the ph of seawater using this device that's called a spectrophotometer. basically how it works is we add a little bit of dye to seawater, this dye that's called cresol purple, and it actually complexes with hydrogen ion in the seawater, so it basically changes color in proportion to the ph othat seawater, and it usually kind of goes from a purple to a red. we then put it in this machine and we shine light through that seawater, and depending on the color, the machine is able to calculate the exact ph of that seawater. the average ph of the ocean is about 8.1. we're expecting it to decline about another .2 to .3 units, possibly more. you may not think that that is an incredibly important 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 expecting is much greater than they've seen in any recent evolutionary period of time. aquilino: all of the caldera instruments come back tomorrow. swezey: oh. hill: so this place will be hummin' starting this weekend. swezey: ok. hill: we were particularly interested in species along the west coast of the u.s. that people would really identify as sort of classic west-coast species. and so we began thinking about ocean acidification impacting abalone and other species that many people on the west coast, if you're walking along a shore, they're the species that you think of as being sort of characteristically what you 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 crashing wave or whatever the ocean 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 becomes more acidic, and we've begun to realize that it's much harder for animals to build their bodies in the first place and kind of maintain what they already have, and that there's a bunch of sensitivities when they're very little. when they're kind of first growing, they're actually very dependent on a stable ph of the ocean. aquilino: white abalone are an ideal species to be looking at some of these questions about ocean acidification because they're a deepwater species. they're often in water that is naturally more acidic than some of the surrounding water, and so if we can figure out how they deal with this problem, we might

be able to apply that to other abalone species that are also facing peril. [surf crashing] swezey: i met doug bush, who is the general manager of the cultured abalone farm, when he came up here to give a seminar. the white abalone breeding program here has really been informed by a lot of the stu 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 very small space. that's all information that's incredibly important to abalone conservation. bush: there's a really strong demand domestically. almost all of ourroduct 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, wch we'll take into the hatchery, and you get a tiny

little fertilized abalone embryo. we get them by the millions. 24 hours laterthey hatch, and feed, feed, feed, repeat, and harvest at about 100 grams, about a 3 1/2-inch shell length. and that's the market size, and we crank those out 52 weeks a year. aquilino: much of what we do here in this program has been inspired by what abalone farmers do, people like doug bush and dan swezey at the cultured abalone farm have really helped us figure out how to maximize production in this lab. so we take their best methods and then we tweak them for white abalone, so it really hps sustainable aquaculture in this country and the restoration of a species. bush: i've been banging this drum for a while, to really sort of draw attention to abalone. it's just a perfect, banner species. aquaculture and marine science has a tendency to sort of do a real cut-and-paste style of research, and so it didn't

seem to me to be a great way to necessarily advance the body of knowledge on how you can effect change and keep that learning trajectory moving forward. when we have a sort of ready suly of something, where you can, like, generate the numbers you need for replicatable research, and you can kind of foster that commercial and 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 to see that population kind of restored to its--its kind of pre-impact population in southern california. hill: they are interested in sort of--if we look toward the future of the farming of abalone, wt can we do to make sure that those abalone are

healthy and resilient to future ocean conditions? but they are also looking at whether particular genetic strains might be more resilient to these future conditions. bush: when they're this size, they're relatively burly. they're capable of withstanding challenges, especially short-term ones. where we are, on the coast, the--the big acidification events, the big ph drops, they're associated with upwelling events, and they don't last forever. they can--these guys can dl with those, but 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, pushbutton operation to just put them in the bucket and make a million babies, you know? and it should be, but it's getting hard and harder and harder every year.

swezey: doug really takes it a step further in that he's willing to work with scientists and groups that are interested in conserving the species on a more personal level because he understands the value in conserving the abalone and having a healthy abalone population both for his business, but also for kind of the historical legacy of the state. he really wants to see abalone continue in the future, and that's what we all want. hill: you know, wow, what an opportunity we have, an ocean acidification research group here at the marine lab. we have an expert on bringing an endangered white abalone species back from the brink, and we have an expert on farming red abalone in the context of ocean acidification, and so, of course, our 3 groups work together because we're interested in trying to understand the future of all of these specs, both for conservation of the species--how do we protect the species in the future?--but also for sustainable farming.

bush: the academic world moves at its own pace. in the commercial world, we're--it moves at its own pace, but there are moments and there are projects that bring everyone into the fold and let the ideas kind of flow. it's very organic. it's the way that thinking works, the way that problem-solving works, the way that you approach a problem from a different perspective sometimes, take a step bac when you're working on a project, you develop the community that helps you move forward. swezey: now we are at this point where the knowledge that's been accumulated here on abalone farms like this is actually a valuable resource,nd it's a critical step in conserving the species in many ways, not only from a technical standpoint, but also from what was achieved, starting the farm in the first place and getting these animals to persist, and so, in that sense, it is a valuable resource from the years and years of

effort to build this place. russo: i think that the time for divers to be passive and to let regulations happen and to let things like that happen and believe that nobody's going to shut your fishery down, i think that's over. i think we should-- i think everybody should be involved. lackey: people would come up with no experience, and we'd be able to take them out in the water, and most of them were pretty successful. i mean, they thought it was the greatest thing in the world, they were super impressed with how many abs there were. but unfortunately, the niche hasn't been filled. the abalone is-- with that gone, there's a missing business component for sure. i'm hopeful that those oasises are going to be fine, they're going to help the spawn comeack in the abalone population, and hopefully we just get back on track.

[surf crashing] swezey: and that the ocean has been this, you know, incredible resource and source of nourishment for me; you know, recreation, wonderment, stimulating my interest in the natural world, and kind of driving what i do, so there's no going somewhere else or eating what's left. this is our shared legacy, our shared resource, and so that's what i bring to 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 tell us

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. 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.

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