A recent plague of plankton, what’s known as a red tide because of the ensuing color of the water, has caused a major die-off of prized abalone as well as other shellfish along the Sonoma and Mendocino coasts in recent weeks. The August red tide, a natural occurrence caused by an upswell of nutrient-rich cold water, is said to have been the worst in three decades. One diver reports seeing “hundreds and hundreds of out-of-the shell abalone out on the rocks,” unlike anything he’d ever seen. Officials are still investigating the exact cause of death of the abalone, and divers are launching a grass-roots campaign to end the harvest for the remainder of the year to let the population recover. You can thus expect certain dim sum items like this to either disappear or get a lot more expensive. [Press-Democrat]
