Officers in California State Park Catch Woman Trying to Smuggle a Rare Sea Creature in Her Pants

On a weekend outing at California’s Van Damme State Park in Little River, south of Mendocino, a woman got the lesson of a lifetime. The woman was hanging around a tidepool in the park along with a male companion. An uncanny thought must have crossed her mind that she knelt, scooped out a red abalone from the pool, and stashed it down her pants. Too bad for her that a wildlife officer was watching, according to a report by the California Department of Fish & Wildlife (CDFW).

The officer was on his routine park patrol with a spotting scope when he caught the woman red-handed. A man and a woman were in the “intertidal zone” collecting purple sea urchins. Something seemed fishy about them. He immediately walked away from the observation point and rushed to the parking lot before the suspects left. During the license and catch inspection, the officer asked the woman whether she was concealing something. The woman readily produced an abalone from her pants. “An unconventional storage method, to say the least,” CDFW jokingly described in the post.

Suspecting that she was hiding more, the wildlife officer sought assistance from a female officer. To avoid her pants being hassled with, the suspect voluntarily produced a second abalone from her pants, confirming the officer’s suspicions. Purple sea urchins and abalones were retrieved and stowed away in the bed of a pickup truck.

Abalones are flattened, spiral-shelled sea snails with calcium carbonate shells lined with mother-of-pearl, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Clinging to rocks, the tiny creatures wait for kelp. Once a piece drifts close, it clamps down on it with its foot and munches on it with its radula, a tongue-like band with dozens of tiny teeth. In the meantime, the blue-blooded creature creates pearls by irritating particles of gravel and secreting shells on parasites.

Once abundant in California, abalones started disappearing after the 20th century, due to overfishing, diseases, and poaching activities. Today, the species is listed among the most vulnerable species at the brink of extinction. Severe population declines pushed the state government to impose strict fishing laws. Since 2016, recreational red abalone fishing has been shut down completely, per The Mendocino Voice.

Recently, the state regulators extended the shutdown till at least 2026, citing the continued low number of abalone and the slow recovery of kelp forests along the North Coast. Under the state law, a suspect can be charged with penalties of up to $40,000 as a fine and up to one year in jail for poaching or smuggling illegally harvested abalones. In this case, the woman was cited for an attempt to smuggle two abalones.

The male companion was found to have complied with the fishing regulations. He was not carrying any creature illegally and therefore was not cited by the officer. The agency did not reveal the identities of those involved, and their faces are blotted out with black strips in the image.

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