Our Pāua Reseeding Project – A Promise Nearly Twenty Years in the Making

From our home on Arapawa Island, we watch the sun rise over Tory Channel nearly every morning. The water shifts from deep indigo to brilliant turquoise as light spreads across the Marlborough Sounds. After more than thirty years here, these rhythms have become part of who we are. The tide charts on our kitchen wall, the smell of kelp drying in the sun, the sound of water moving through our tanks, this is the rhythm of our daily life.

But it's what we can't always see that keeps us working. Beneath the surface, in the rocky crevices and seaweed forests of these waters, pāua have been disappearing.

When the Ocean Spoke, We Listened

Mike started diving for abalone in California back in 1964, when he was young and the ocean seemed endless. By the time the fishery closed in the late 1990s, he'd learned a hard lesson about what happens when they take more than nature can give back. When Antonia and Mike bought their farm here in 1993 and started working with pāua in 2001, he carried that lesson with him.

In 2005, they began noticing the same troubling signs along parts of New Zealand's coast that they'd seen decades earlier in California, stretches of reef that should have been thick with pāua showing only empty shells and bare rock. As divers and stewards of these waters, they couldn't look away. So they started small, the way most lasting things begin: with a few mature pāua, some makeshift tanks, and a simple question: could we help bring them back?

That question became their life's work.

The Work That Time Forgot to Notice

Every spawning season, we collect wild pāua from local waters and bring them to our tanks. We create optimal conditions for them to spawn by carefully combining genetics from multiple males and females, thereby maintaining a strong and diverse gene pool. The eggs develop into tiny larvae, then settle and begin their slow transformation into miniature pāua no bigger than a pinhead.

This is where the real work begins. For eight to twelve months, someone needs to be here, checking water flow, monitoring temperatures, collecting fresh seaweed from Cook Strait, cleaning tanks, and watching for any signs of stress or disease. We average four to five hours every single day. There are no days off when you're raising young pāua, the ocean doesn't take holidays, and neither do we.

When they reach ten to twenty-five millimetres, they are strong enough to survive in the wild. We carefully pack them and work with experienced divers who know precisely where to place them, tucked into rocky overhangs and crevices where they'll be protected as they grow. We've released hundreds of thousands over the years, each one representing months of care and a small seed of hope for the future.

The Evidence That Keeps Us Going

We know reseeding works because we've watched it happen. In areas of Tory Channel where we released nearly a hundred thousand juveniles back in 2012, trained divers later found something remarkable: when they turned over rocks, roughly ninety per cent of the young pāua sheltering there were from our reseeding efforts. That year's class has now grown to harvestable size, proving that with patience and proper placement, we can help restore what has been lost.

The science backs up what we've seen firsthand. Working with researchers from Cawthron Institute, we've monitored reseeded areas using careful transect surveys, tracking survival rates and growth patterns. The numbers tell a story of recovery: roughly thirty per cent of released juveniles survive to harvestable size, bringing new life to stretches of coast that had been declining for years.

A Second Chance for Waiheke

Earlier this year, we had an opportunity to put this knowledge into action in a different way. After unusually low tides on Waiheke Island left undersized pāua vulnerable and at risk, we were asked to help.

You can watch that rescue story unfold here:

Could Aotearoa lose one of its iconic kaimoana forever? I The Hui 2025

It's a small example of what becomes possible when people care enough to act, and when you have the facilities and knowledge to make a real difference.

Why We Need Your Help Now

This year, we're asking for something we've never asked before: help from the wider community to expand what we can do. Our Givealittle campaign isn't about building something flashy or new. It's about strengthening what already works so we can do more of it.

With your support, we'll be able to increase the number of juvenile pāua we can raise and release each season. Every dollar goes directly toward ocean restoration, toward giving New Zealand's iconic pāua the fighting chance they deserve.

We'll also continue sharing this work with groups and visitors who come to learn about marine conservation. There's something powerful about watching people peer into the tanks and see thousands of thumbnail-sized pāua clinging to the walls, knowing that each one will eventually make its way back to the wild.

More Than a Species: A Promise

For us, this work has never been just about pāua numbers or fishery quotas, although those are important. It's about keeping a promise to the ocean that's sustained our family for three decades. It's about passing on healthy coastal waters to the next generation. It's about proving that restoration is possible when people commit to it for the long haul.

The ocean has given us so much: a home, a livelihood, purpose, and daily wonder. This is how we give back.

If you'd like to be part of this promise, you can support our reseeding work through our Givealittle campaign. Together, we can restore the heart of our ocean, one carefully raised pāua at a time.

The Pāua Reseeding Project - Help Us Restore the Heart of Our Ocean