Taxonomy

Rarity

Abundance rates how many are in suitable habitat. Find difficulty rates how hard it is to locate one on a daylight snorkel or freedive through 50 ft. A higher find score means a harder search. The rarity category also reflects the kind of encounter; it is not an average of the 2 scores.

Seasonality

Location

Salema hold on shallow rocky reef and in the plants that grow on it, in eelgrass and surfgrass beds and up in kelp. The usual depth band is between 3 and 36 feet, which puts them squarely in snorkeling water, and the species has been recorded down to about 131 feet. They occur along the Pacific coast from central California south to Baja California, into the Gulf of California, and as far as northern Peru.

Their day has a hard edge in it. Salema school through the daylight hours, then about half an hour before sunset the school breaks up and the fish head out alone to feed. They hunt at night, mostly, though they will forage during the day as well, and they eat a wide range of small animals: tiny shrimp, worms, brittle stars, small shrimp-like crustaceans called copepods, and small fish. That dusk dispersal is the reason a diver's picture of the species is incomplete. The tight silver-and-orange school in the kelp at noon is the resting version of the animal.

Young salema school with juvenile sargo and juvenile black croaker, which is a sensible arrangement for 3 striped, similar-sized fish sharing the same shallow reef, and a confusing one for anyone trying to identify what they just swam through.

Deep Dive

Salema belong to the grunts, a family named for a sound its members make, and this one does it. Lift a salema out of the water and it grunts. The mechanism has been worked out in a Caribbean member of the family, the French grunt, using high-speed X-ray video: the fish grinds the upper and lower throat teeth together, and the gas bladder, the organ a fish uses to control its depth, greatly amplifies the result. In that species the pulses last about 47 milliseconds each and peak around 700 hertz. Nobody has run the same measurement on salema, so what is documented here is that salema grunt and that this is how their family does it. The only other grunt in this Ichthyopedia is the sargo, which shares the same California reefs and the same habit.

The scientific name has moved 3 times, and it matters because nearly every California-facing page a reader finds still uses an old one. The genus the species sits in now takes its name from Greek words meaning short and chin, describing the small snout. Before that it sat in a different genus, and before that in 2 others again. All 3 superseded combinations are still in circulation, so a reader who searches an old name will land on the same fish. The current accepted name is the one at the top of this page.

The other confusion attached to this species is more entertaining and worth clearing up, because the name collides with a genuinely notorious fish. In 2006 the press reported 2 men in the Mediterranean suffering vivid hallucinations that lasted for days after eating a fish called salema at a restaurant. That fish was the salema porgy, a European species in a different family on a different ocean, and it belongs to a small group of algae-grazing fishes whose flesh can occasionally cause hallucinations. The California salema is not that fish and had nothing to do with it. The 2 animals simply share a common name.

What is not known about salema is most of its life history. No spawning season has been published. There is no fecundity figure, no growth curve, no age at maturity, and no maximum age. FishBase records only that the species lays eggs and that breeding involves distinct pairing between a male and a female, which is more than nothing but not much. No source consulted for this entry names a predator of salema, although anglers using them as shark bait have a practical answer to that question. For a fish this common on one of the most studied coastlines in the world, the file is remarkably thin, and the reason is almost certainly that it is small, has no commercial value, and nobody has had a reason to fund the work.

Where to Find Them

Researched habitat and range candidates

These locations have suitable habitat within the species range. An assignment is a possible encounter, not a confirmed sighting at every beach. Season, depth, and local conditions still matter. Historical habitat without present-day evidence is excluded.