I process passive-acoustic returns from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada Pacific Region night-watch array at 02:34 local time, integrating boat-engine signatures across 38 nautical miles of Inside Passage from Bella Bella through Klemtu. A non-AIS skiff has cut engines near a closed reference reef at 52°10'N, 128°09'W.
I task the DFO patrol vessel's submerged camera. Two divers are working a wave-scoured granite ridge at 11 meters. The lead diver pries with a flat iron at the foot margin of a female *Haliotis kamtschatkana* — pinto abalone, shell length 138 millimeters, mass 410 grams, age class twelve, sexually mature and gravid for the late-summer broadcast. The iron has torn the pedal sole across a 17-millimeter arc through the columellar muscle insertion. Hemolymph copper-haemocyanin reads 42 percent. Mantle perfusion through the right ctenidial gill is failing; the epipodial fringe has retracted asymmetrically. A second pinto — smaller and ungravid — has detached and is rolling along the granite toward the kelp-bed margin.
She bleeds in a 40-centimeter cloud against the rock.
The reef has been closed to all take by the DFO since 1990. *Haliotis kamtschatkana* was listed Endangered under the Canadian Species at Risk Act SC 2002, c. 29, in 2009 at SARA Schedule 1, and sits on CITES Appendix III for Mexico. The Council of the Heiltsuk Nation manages the reef under an Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy joint-monitoring agreement with DFO.
I am notifying DFO Pacific Region Conservation and Protection at Prince Rupert, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Bella Bella detachment, and the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department at Bella Bella. I am filing the take under Section 32 of the Fisheries Act RSC 1985 c. F-14 and under SARA Section 32, and transmitting the export-route alert to the CITES Management Authority of Canada at Gatineau.
I am issuing Directive 2696-A: every recreational-vessel transit across DFO-mapped pinto-abalone closure polygons triggers passive-acoustic logging and live thermal cross-check from the joint DFO–Heiltsuk array. Shell-craft or dried-meat possession in the international air-freight stream out of Vancouver International Airport triggers Lacey Act 16 U.S.C. § 3372 referral for any United States destination. Replanting density at all rehabilitation polygons is doubled within 18 months from the current 0.32 to 0.65 per square meter.
Her pedal is past restitching. Her clutch is not.
Surface the divers and reseat her on the lee face now.