Spearfishing Stats

Taxonomy

Rarity

The redbanded rockfish is out of reach at every point in its range, and it is on this page for identification rather than for encounter. The shallowest record is 161 feet and the population sits between 492 and 1,148 feet, on soft seabed and mixed mud, pebble and rock. It is legal to take in California inside the 10-fish rockfish bag with no size limit and no sub-limit, which is a rule that will never come up for a diver.

It matters commercially in the north. Trawl bycatch off British Columbia exceeded 1,000 tons in 1992 and has fallen substantially since under better monitoring. There is no species-specific United States stock assessment, and the IUCN has never evaluated it. FishBase rates it very low resilience, with a population that would need more than 14 years to double.

That rating follows directly from the single most striking fact about the species, which is how long it lives.

Regulations

CDFW rules verified 2026-09-04

Seasonality

Edibility

Location

Redbanded rockfish run from Zhemchug Canyon in the Bering Sea and Amchitka Island in the Aleutians south to San Diego, which is a range spanning most of the North Pacific coast of North America. They hold on soft seabed and on muddy, pebbly and rocky bottom, between 161 and 2,051 feet, with most fish in the band from 492 to 1,148.

The fish is white, pink or red, carrying 4 vertical red or orange bands that fade as it ages, with a notably spiny head and fins that often show darkened edges. It reaches 25 inches and about 9.7 pounds. Those bands are also the source of a long-running identification problem, because the flag rockfish of central and southern California is likewise pale with 4 red bands that fade with age. The 2 species are separated in practice by geography and depth: this is the northern fish and the deep one, reaching 25 inches, while the flag rockfish is the southern one, on reef, reaching 20. FishBase warns that flag rockfish records above 20 inches were probably this species.

What redbanded rockfish eat has not been documented in the sources available, so this entry does not list prey. Its trophic level marks it as a carnivore and nothing further is established.

Spearfishing Brief

There is nothing to hunt here. The fish lives between 161 and 2,051 feet, mostly below 490, across a range that runs from the Bering Sea to San Diego, and there is no shallow life stage that brings it into reach. It is legal in California inside the 10-fish rockfish bag with no sub-limit and no size limit, and spear divers are exempt from the season and depth restrictions, and none of that changes the arithmetic.

No spearfishing literature exists for the species, no California angling record was located, and nobody has published a description of how it eats. This entry leaves the table quality blank rather than guessing at it.

Deep Dive

William Thompson described the redbanded rockfish in 1915 and named it for John Pease Babcock, the first Commissioner of Fisheries for British Columbia. The fish deserves the honor if only for endurance: the maximum reported age for the species is 106 years.

That number is worth holding still for. A redbanded rockfish caught today at the top of its age range settled onto the bottom around 1920, and has been sitting on the same shelf through every year of West Coast fishing since. It is the longest-lived species researched for this batch of rockfish, ahead of the canary at 75 to 84 years, the yellowtail at 50 to 64, the cowcod at 55, and far beyond the small nearshore species that top out in the twenties.

Extreme longevity is common enough in this genus to be one of its defining features, and it is the reason rockfish management looks the way it does. A population of century-scale animals accumulates decades of adults, and the great majority of the reproductive output comes from the oldest and largest females. Fishing removes those first. The population can look healthy by numbers for years while its reproductive capacity quietly collapses, because the fish being counted are young ones that have not yet started contributing. This is the mechanism behind every rockfish rebuilding plan on the coast, and it is why the rebuilding timelines run 10 to 30 years rather than 2 or 3.

There is a genuine oddity in the maturity data for this species that is worth flagging rather than smoothing over. One account reports that California redbanded rockfish mature at age 3 while British Columbia fish may take 19. A 16-year difference across a range is not impossible, since growth in this genus tracks water temperature and food supply and southern fish generally mature faster, but an age-3 maturity in a fish that lives to 106 is startling, and the claim traces to a single uncited source. It is recorded here as reported and not built upon.

What is better established is the birth season: females release live young between March and September, a long window compared with the tight January-to-February pulse of the widow rockfish or the winter-into-spring window of the shallow nearshore species. Maturity length is around 15 inches.

The rest of the record is thin. Diet is undocumented. Predators are undocumented. There is no United States stock assessment. For a fish that can live a century and shows up by the ton in northern trawl catches, that is a remarkable amount of not knowing, and it is the normal condition for most of the species on this identification chart.

Where to Find Them

Beaches whose habitats match this species

Matched by habitat: a beach is listed when its biome tags overlap this species' biomes.