[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,e and that's good news in some ways, when we think about climate change becaus

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 carbon