Abalones at risk: A global Red List assessment of Haliotis in a changing climate

Prı´ncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, and although there are limited data on its status, it is vulnerable to ecological change, MHWs and other environmental threats [68]. The remaining two species in this sector are LC. Western Indian Ocean. This sector includes the entire coastline from the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, south through East and Southern Africa including the Mascarene Islands and the whole of South Africa to St Helena Bay on the Western Cape. There are ten species (Table 4). The recently described H. arabiensis Owen, Regter & Van Laethem, 2016 (NT) has a highly restricted range in southern Oman and is considered very rare. H. mariae (EN), known as the Omani abalone, is the only commercially fished species within this group occurring outside of South Africa. Continuing over-exploitation coupled with pollution, weather and harmful algal blooms have extirpated populations across a third of its distribution [69, 70]. H. queketti, H. squamosa, H. alfredensis and H. parva (all DD) suffer a paucity of data on populations with some distributions unresolved. H. midae (EN) (Fig 5), the most important commercially fished abalone in Africa and commonly known as ‘perlemoen’, has for many years been subject of a commercial fishery, recreational fishing and uncontrolled poaching by organised criminal Fig 2. Numbers of abalone species by category code analysed by oceanic region. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309384.g002 Table 3. Atlantic abalone. Species name Size C Distribution Cat mm Atlantic H. geigeri 41 São Tome´ & Prı´ncipe in the Gulf of Guinea VU

H. marmorata 76 Senegal, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoˆire, Gabon LC H. mykonosensis 58 North-central Mediterranean, from Corsica to the Aegean coast of Turkey LC H. pourtalesii 31 Carolinas, Florida, NE/NW Gulf of Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Suriname, C. Brazil DD H. stomatiaeformis 45 Sicily, Malta and Lampedusa VU H. tuberculata 135 C English Channel Is. S. to Northwest Africa (Mauritania) and the Mediterranean VU ‘C’ denotes commercially fished. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309384.t003 PLOS ONE Abalones at risk: A global Red List assessment of Haliotis PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309384 December 23, 2024 11 / 25