These rare creatures are incredibly difficult for divers to find in the deep waters where they live.

"We've been working for six to seven years to find loner abalone along the coast," says fish biologist Dave Witting from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"We spoke to old abalone divers who are long retired now, but, basically we picked their brains and found some locations," says Witting, who collected the male abalone that Aquilino drove to Bodega Marine Lab. "He was extremely hard to find," says Witting. "It looked like a fuzzy rock."

Not only was the abalone difficult to spot, but Witting needed a special Endangered Species Act permit to collect him—a permit that took two years to acquire. So the animal's arrival at Bodega Marine Lab was historic.

“This is a big moment,” said Aquilino. “They will go extinct in 10 to 15 years if there’s not a program to place them back in the wild.”

Aquilino gingerly placed the snail inside a bright blue bucket at the lab, where her 12-person research team runs a captive breeding program to protect white abalone from dying off.

Like all new abalone that arrive, he received a nickname: abalone 314 or “Pi.” Researchers were hoping Pi's arrival would introduce new DNA into the aging captive population, creating stronger offspring with more genetic diversity—and a better chance for survival.

The Path to Extinction

White abalone was once a delicacy at California seafood restaurants, the most highly prized of all abalone species for its soft meat. Then it disappeared from menus in 1993 when the fishery was closed due to overfishing.

Buzz Owen, a retired commercial and recreational abalone diver, recalls his abundant abalone catches back in the '50s and '60s.

"There was no limit on the number you could take," says Owen.

"My record was in 1961. After diving for nine hours near Catalina Island when I caught 83 dozen including some whites and greens and pinks. "That didn't even dent this population."

Size limits on what divers could catch were intended to protect abalone so they could mature and reproduce. But it wasn't enough to prevent the numbers from dwindling to a crisis point. The scattered survivors were too far apart for their ejected sperm and eggs to mingle, so spawning was rarely successful.

The government eventually realized closing the fishery wasn't enough, so they made collection of all abalone a federal crime in 1997. (One exception for abalone diving remains: there's still a legal, recreational red abalone fishery north of San Francisco.)

Then in 2001, white abalone became the first marine invertebrate to receive federal protection as an endangered species after the population had declined by almost 99 percent.

The success—or failure—of white abalone now depends on the breeding program at the Bodega Lab, and six other organizations, including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and NOAA, that support the effort.

During the first captive breeding attempt at UC Santa Barbara in 2001, the parent abalone created 100,000 juveniles, but almost all of them died due to a fatal wasting disease called withering syndrome.

In 2003, the Channel Islands Marine Resource Institute in Santa Barbara bred the abalone again and after the Bodega lab received a permit in 2011, it bred animals in 2012.

Captive breeding was finally turning a corner. Between 2012 and 2014, the number of abalone that survived to be juveniles increased threefold.