Overview
The pāua is the most brightly coloured of all our sea shells. In the water, the outside of its thick oval shell is rough and dull green, and often encrusted with coral-like seaweeds and other animals. Inside, the shell is a beautiful iridescent blue, green, and mauve. Beneath the shell is a shiny, black, muscular foot which enables the pāua to glide about quite quickly when foraging for food.
Pāua move about and forage at night, and hide, motionless, during the day. If you disturb a pāua, it clings to the rock with its powerful foot. They live under rocks and ledges, from low tide level down to six metres, but a few go down to twenty metres. Often the paua crowd together on shallow reefs.
Under the best conditions, such as around Wellington’s rocky coasts, pāua reach their full size in 3–4 years, but they grow more slowly on some other coasts. On Banks Peninsula, for example, they are all small – they are called ‘shorties’ down there. The largest pāua (up to 200 mm long) may be twenty-five years old or more.
Pāua eat seaweeds, nipping off small pieces with their rough, belt-like tongue (radula) which has thousands of tiny sharp teeth. They prefer soft, fleshy species of red seaweeds, and use their tongues to scrape microscopic algae off rock surfaces.
Pāua breathe by drawing water in round the edge of the shell, passing it across the gills to remove the oxygen, then squirting the spent water out through the row of holes along the side of the shell.
A female pāua lays many thousands of eggs which hatch into shell-less, barrel-shaped swimming larvae (called ‘trochophores’). The larvae are carried far and wide on ocean currents. They are sieved out of the water in their millions and eaten by plankton-feeding animals.
Eventually, surviving young pāua grow a shell and sink to the seabed. Most drop into the ocean depths, or land on unsuitable kinds of seabed. A lucky few land on the shallow rocky seabed and thrive there, if they can avoid being eaten by predatory tube worms. But even as adults, many pāua fall victim to the giant (up to 750 mm across) seven-armed starfish that prises them off the rock to eat them.
New Zealand pāua live on rocky shores – from the Three Kings Islands in the north, to Stewart Island in the south, and as far east as the Chatham Islands. The largest, and most sought-after for meat and shell, come from Stewart Island.
Today, there are legal restrictions to protect pāua from over-fishing. An individual can take only ten pāua a day, and shells smaller than 125 mm diameter must be returned to the water. You are not allowed to fish for pāua with scuba gear. Because they cling with such great suction a broad, thin-bladed knife is needed to prise pāua off their rocks.
Pāua has been one of the most intensively utilised marine creatures as long as people have been living here. Māori have used pāua as a food source and the shells as containers for holding and mixing pigments. The shell has also been fashioned into ornaments of personal adornment, decorative elements in carvings, and inlays in articles such as fish hooks (its colours are effective lures for fish such as kahawai and barracouta).
Today, it is still enormously popular as food for Māori and other New Zealanders. Its flesh, shell, and more recently, pearls are all commercially marketed. Its ornamental use flourishes in craft work and souvenir manufacture.
Two other species of pāua live in New Zealand waters – the orange-footed pāua (Haliotis australis) and the virgin or white-footed pāua (Haliotis virginea). The shells of these species, and about two million other sea shells, are to be found in Te Papa’s shell collection. Other countries have shellfish resembling our pāua. In California they are called ‘abalones’, in the Channel Islands ‘ormers’, and in Australia ‘mutton-fish’.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (1998)..