Trans-Holocene Human Impacts on Endangered California Black Abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) Population Structures: Historical Ecological Management Implications from the Northern Channel Islands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) were an important subsistence resource in southern California for 10,000 years, first for coastal Native Americans, then as a commercial shellfishery. By 1993, however, black abalone populations declined dramatically, resulting in the closure of the California fishery. Recently, black abalone are showing signs of population rebound along some Channel Island shorelines, including the presence of juveniles and increasing densities. We analyzed black abalone size data from San Miguel Island at prehistoric and historical archaeological sites spanning the last 10,000 years and compared these populations to those described by Channel Island National Park biologists between 1985 and 2013. We found a statistically significant relationship between SST and black abalone size distributions during the ancient record, along with dramatic shifts in population size structure towards larger individuals between the nineteenth century and modern periods. Our study provides a deep historical perspective of abalone population size distributions, patterns within these distributions through time, and parallels to modern abalone populations, and may help managers determine whether the current (and future) size and age structure of black abalone populations around the northern Channel Islands are "natural" and healthy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22950