ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
There is a point on the Southern California coast that looks very much like it has for hundreds of years. It's called Point Conception...
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SHAPIRO: ...Home to one of the oldest standing lighthouses on the West Coast and home to hundreds of species of plants and animals, some of which are endangered. NPR's Nathan Rott has the story of an effort to bring one back.
NATHAN ROTT, BYLINE: Our search starts as the tide recedes.
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ROTT: Seawater spilling down the terraced rock ledges that make up this shoreline. But to find black abalone and what we're really hoping to find - their babies - you have to look beyond exposed tide pools and be a bit of a contortionist.
NATE FLETCHER: Can you see this?
KARAH COX-AMMANN: Where are you? Oh, you're way over there. OK.
ROTT: Biologists Nate Fletcher and Karah Cox-Ammann are wedged nearly upside down on the opposite sides of a rough-edged boulder, shining flashlights to light their way.
FLETCHER: You just see four, right? I have to feel one, but...
COX-AMMANN: One, two, three, four.
FLETCHER: Yeah.
COX-AMMANN: Yeah.
FLETCHER: OK.
ROTT: Black abalone are federally endangered large sea snails treasured for their meat and their smooth, blue-black shells by people here for millennia.
COX-AMMANN: In here is a great view, but you have to crawl in here.
ROTT: I'm happy to crawl in.
COX-AMMANN: (Laughter) He's unafraid.
FLETCHER: You got to experience it.
COX-AMMANN: Oh, there's one.
ROTT: They live in the intertidal - right up close to the shore - from northern California all the way down to Baja, California. But the ones we're looking for here have a defining feature glued to their shells.
COX-AMMANN: Do you see one on the ground?
ROTT: Yeah.
COX-AMMANN: Do you see the little yellow tag?
ROTT: Oh, yeah - 664.
COX-AMMANN: Six-six-four?
ROTT: Yeah.
COX-AMMANN: Yeah. They all had two of those.
ROTT: That's because this black abalone - and 246 in total - were moved here, to the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve near Point Conception, by Fletcher and his team as part of a translocation.
FLETCHER: There's kind of two types of what we call conservation translocations. There's ones to, like, kind of replenish populations like this. And then there's reintroductions where, you know, there's...
ROTT: Like the wolf.
FLETCHER: Yeah. There's - the species has been extirpated from the local range or natural range, and then they're brought in and reintroduced.
ROTT: Black abalone populations on the West Coast were decimated by overconsumption and then disease. On the Channel Islands, visible on the horizon to the south, populations remained robust. So about a year ago, Fletcher and his team moved some from the islands to here, on the mainland, to try to give the black abalone that remain here a better chance of propagating. Fletcher says black abalone are what's called broadcast spawners.
FLETCHER: Males release sperm. The females release eggs. Fertilization occurs in the water column.
ROTT: That's not very romantic.
FLETCHER: Yeah, I know.
ROTT: So you need a lot of them in a small area to really, you know, make the magic happen.
FLETCHER: We figured, oh, we could start it here and maybe it would be a - you know, the population maybe then progress into Southern California.
ROTT: Translocations of plants and animals can be controversial. The gray wolf that was reintroduced from Canada to the Northern Rockies in the '90s and more recently in Colorado is a pretty good example. But scientists say they're becoming an increasingly useful tool in an age of climate change, sprawling human development and rapidly worsening extinction rates.
ELIZABETH HIROYASU: Maybe there is a freeway in the way that they can't get over.
ROTT: Elizabeth Hiroyasu is the lead scientist at the Dangermond Preserve, which is managed by The Nature Conservancy.
HIROYASU: Maybe there's some kind of biogeographic boundary, like a mountain range, that they can't get across.
ROTT: Maybe there's a 60-mile channel of water - like there is here - separating struggling populations from healthier ones.
HIROYASU: There's a new urgency with the biodiversity crisis to get things to places where they need to be in order to make sure that they survive or persist over the long term.
ROTT: And a new urgency, Hiroyasu says, to make sure there are still places for wildlife to move to.
HIROYASU: Because if you don't have a place to move things to, then that whole conversation becomes irrelevant.
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ROTT: Back on the rocky shorelines, the researchers spend about five hours searching for the moved abalone, and they do find many. They do not find any babies.
But when you guys find one, you let you me know.
FLETCHER: Oh, we will. Yeah (laughter).
ROTT: Nathan Rott, NPR News, Point Conception, California.
(SOUNDBITE OF CORMEGA SONG, "ALL I NEED IS YOU") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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