Welcome to Fall! Greetings from PSRF. Thank you enormously for supporting the wild world of marine restoration. Here's a glimpse into our Pinto Abalone Recovery Program and other updates.

Pinto abalone: A most gregarious marine snail

Spawning Success. We've just wrapped-up a successful 2019 pinto abalone spawning season! This spring and summer we settled just over 2 million abalone larvae from 21 distinct families in our grow-out nursery at the Kenneth K. Chew Center for Shellfish Research and Restoration located at NOAA’s Manchester Research Station. Over the next 9 months, we will dutifully care for these abalone in our nursery until they are large enough to be outplanted by our dive team in 2020 to restoration sites in the San Juan Islands. We tend to these miniscule animals - now only the size of the head of a pin - to help them through a major survival bottleneck as they go from larval to juvenile abalone, so they have a higher chance of surviving once introduced to rocky reefs. We've outplanted over 21,000 animals to date, and look forward to adding these new ones to the mix. Our goal is to recover this vanishing species and maintain the health of rocky reef habitat.

Welcome, Caitlin! We are thrilled to welcome Caitlin O’Brien back to the PSRF family as our Abalone Research Biologist. Caitlin worked as a technician with us from 2015-7, then went to Western Washington University, where she recently received her Master’s degree developing abalone cryopreservation techniques.

Cryopreservation for Restoration. Cryopreservation is the technique of exposing sperm cells to extremely low temperatures (-196°C) to allow for long-term storage. Caitlin is fine-tuning our methods to begin building a library of cryogenic samples for future spawns. Cryopreservation will allow us to develop a sperm bank for spawning events, which will help us maintain genetic diversity, extend the natural breeding season, boost production, and potentially allow broodstock to be returned to the wild to contribute further to the gene pool. Wish us luck and stay tuned!

In case you missed these recent articles featuring PSRF and our partners, have a scan:

• The tiny but mighty Olympia oyster regains a foothold in Washington waters. The Seattle Times, Pacific NW Magazine, 2019
• Why it wasn’t enough to just leave the pinto abalone alone. Crosscut. 2019
• Another vital forest at risk: Scientists fear warming water could be killing off Puget Sound’s kelp beds. The Seattle Times, 2019