Charity Run for OC’s Green Abalone Sea Snails SATURDAY OC Weekly [Video]

Don’t go to this weekend’s “Abalone Run” in Huntington Beach expecting to find your friendly neighborhood sushi chef with a net. This event is a first-ever 5k run to raise money and awareness for the nonprofit Green Abalone Restoration Project.

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Turns out the little muscular sea snails with beautiful blue and green interior shell colors have been over-harvested off our coast. “This beautiful sea creature’s population is now on verge of extinction in Southern California,” reports the nonprofit Orange County Coastkeeper environmental group.

Speaking of OC nonprofits, the founder of another one, marine biologist Nancy Caruso of Garden Grove-based Get Inspired! Inc., was so distressed over the local disappearance of green abalone (Haliotis fulgens) that she organized Saturday’s “Abalone Run.”

The restoration project aims to revive the population in Southern California through farming 100,000 green abalone and releasing them into the Pacific once mature. Here’s video of Coastkeeper staff and interns taking tissue samples from green abalone …