Curse of the Sea Snail.(South Africa struggles with abalone poaching)

As the boat nears the beach at Hawston Harbor, a group of South African plain-clothes cops wearing jeans and sneakers jump out of a double-cab pickup truck with shotguns and handguns drawn. But the poachers, seven or eight of them, must have gotten wind of the bust. From the boat, one fires a pistol in the air. The officers dive behind a red car for cover and lob a container of tear gas at a hostile crowd now gathering on the beach. After a few tense minutes, one of the cops emerges from behind the car, almost daring the shooter to fire again. "It was only a scare tactic," he scoffs, "while they ditch the 'pearlies'." But the tactic succeeds. By the time the cops reach the shoreline, the boat is racing off again, and there's nothing left to confiscate.

The battle over abalone is not typically as sexy as other African wildlife crusades. This overgrown sea snail doesn't set pulses beating among environmentalists in Europe or the United States. Yet the abalone--known on Africa's southern tip as the perlemoen--is master of its realm, king of the kelp forest. And like the elephant and rhino, it will soon go extinct without protection. Gourmands in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Taiwan pay $60 a plate for the delicacy--and prices are still rising. That has spurred criminal gangs to bear down on the world's least-protected abalone fishery, a 200-kilometer stretch of the South African coastline. "The authorities are understaffed, underpaid, outgunned and outnumbered," says Thomas Peschak, a University of Cape Town marine biologist studying the effects of the decline of the local abalone species, Haliotis midae. "The way things are going now, I give the species three or four years."

That would be the end of a long road. Archeological remains show that southern African aborigines dined on Haliotis midae as early as 4,000 years ago. Commercial fishing began in 1952 in South Africa, and around the same time in other prime breeding grounds off Canada, California, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. In recent years over fishing has led all those countries to severely limit or end harvests of most of the more than 50 commercial species of abalone.

Partly as a result of reduced supply, prices have skyrocketed. That may ultimately make commercial abalone farming economically viable despite the heavy capital investment it requires, ...