No baloney, ABALONE!!!!

Posted by Lisa on December 11th, 2005 — Posted in Activities

Steve didn’t have to work on Thursday as it was a national holiday here in Chile, the Immaculate Conception. A friend of mine Liz Anne, invited a group of us to her house/abalone farm. They live about 15 min south of us on a beautiful 26 acre ocean front property. Her husband Mike is a marine biologist, and they started the first abalone farm here in Chile 9 years ago. They have a second abalone farm in the south of Chile, in Chiloe. We had a wonderful time learning about abalone (which is a vegetarian sea snail). They started their stock of abalone from some brought over from California. They now raise millions of baby abalone until they’re about an inch and a half, and sell them to buyers in the Lake District (which is the South of Chile). There, a law was passed allowing the abalone farmers to grow their abalone directly in the ocean. On Mike’s farm, as you can see in the pictures, they have big houses where they grow their abalone, and pump water in from the ocean and filter out any bad stuff, and use that for the abalone. Here in La Serena they sell loco, which is similar to abalone, except that it’s carnivorous. There are many abalone farms in Chile now, but the abalone are all exported mainly to Asia. Afterwards the bunch of us went to Guanaqueros to El Pequeño for lunch. Steve was happy to finally go on an outing with us.

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