Abalone IME is very hardy. It survived several disasters in my tank. I had 2, and they only come out after lights out. If I purposely leave the lights on for 24 hours, they will hide out for 24 hours.
If you want to use it to control hair algae, forget it.
If you want to use it to control any kind of macro, forget it.
Mine seems to only graze on film algae and probably some detritus in my tank. Even so, they don't do cleaning jobs any better than a few turbo snails.
The abalone in my tank do help to get the perceived value of the tank up quite a bit. My Chinese friends always come by to check on the growth progress of the 2 abalone. They are probably trying to make sashimi. Even repeated attempts to warn them not to touch my babies 'cause I've dumped so much unknown chemicals into the water doesn't seems to deter them from staring at the abalone, and the sea horses.......
One thing is abalone is quite clumsy, if they decided to climb onto the LR, it is pretty guaranteed that they will knock over a few loosely positioned corals. But the good thing is they don't really like the pebbly rocky surfaces of the LR and pretty much stayed on the glass.
Mine lived until I sold the tank back to LFS. I don't know what happened to them afterwards, Just hope the owner didn't make delicacy out of them......
