Their distinctive hole-punched shells are still familiar, but the creatures that live inside them — abalone — have nearly vanished from Orange County shores.

Marine biologist Nancy Caruso says she has a plan for bringing them back: let school children grow them in the classroom. The first step will be capturing as many as 20 of the few remaining green abalone off Orange County and testing them for disease.

“Nobody is restocking in Southern California,” she said. “I’d be the only one doing it.”

Caruso received a special permit from state Fish and Game to catch green abalone, and, with her team of divers, plans to do so within weeks. If the agency gives the all-clear, Caruso wants to set up abalone-growing tanks in Orange County schools, much as she’s done in past years with giant kelp.

“I figured this would be easy for kids to do,” Caruso said of growing abalone. “They have faces. Kelp doesn’t have a face.”

First, of course, she must reacquaint youngsters with a species that has grown far too rare.

“I’ve been going to classrooms around Orange County,” says marine biologist Nancy Caruso. “No one knew what one was.”

Nancy Caruso

That’s especially troubling, she says, because abalone were once almost unimaginably plentiful along the shoreline. “You had to step over them to get to the water. Black abalones were stacked on top of each other.”

Caruso has launched her own non-profit organization and Web site, getinspiredinc.org, to advance her abalone project.

There are many species of abalone — among them red, white, pink, black and Caruso’s target, the greens — and they took two major blows that have crippled their populations in recent decades.

They had the misfortune of making a tasty meal. That led to severe overharvesting.

Then came withering disease: infection with a type of bacteria that causes the abalone’s tissues to waste away, eventually killing the animal. They also fell prey to an invasive worm that distorts their shell growth.

Now, populations of green abalone are so low that that itself could become a factor in their decline. If they’re too few and far between, they’re unable to spawn properly.

Caruso said Fish and Game officials liked her idea of growing abalone in classrooms, but were worried about whether withering disease still plagued Orange County populations.

So she won permission to find out. She’ll collect the abalone, keep them about 24 hours to obtain fecal samples, then return them to the ocean.

It’s unclear how the results would affect Caruso’s project. If the local abalone are free of the disease, that could raise concern about bringing in green abalone from farms elsewhere on the coast — part of Caruso’s plan — because they might carry infectious bacteria.

If the disease is still present locally, however, that still doesn’t guarantee Fish and Game will allow her project to proceed.

“It started this whole debate,” Caruso said. “It’s kind of interesting.”

Caruso, however, is nothing if not determined. She still grows and watches over giant kelp plantations along the coast, despite being laid off from marine biology jobs twice, losing funding for her projects and, at times, having difficulty getting access to boats and equipment.

Along with the green abalone, she’d like to have the students, grades six through 12, grow white sea bass as well. She hopes to begin in Huntington Beach.

“I’m hoping this is kind of ground-breaking,” she said.

(Register photo of abalone under cultivation at the Carlsbad Aquafarm by Daniel A. Anderson.)

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