Spearfishing Stats

Taxonomy

Rarity

Salema are common on southern California reefs and easy to overlook, because they are small and they look like something else. A schooling fish with a bass-shaped body, very large eyes and 6 to 8 orange-brown stripes down the side gets called a small striped bass often enough that the misidentification has its own history. Southern California anglers have called them bass, big eye bass, striped bass and lima perch.

The species is most common from Santa Monica south into the tropics. It becomes uncommon north of Point Dume in Los Angeles County and rare north of Santa Barbara, even though occurrence records reach Monterey Bay. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists salema as Least Concern, but that assessment was made in 2007 and has not been revisited in 19 years, so it describes the situation as it stood then rather than now. There is no directed fishery. Commercial interest is minor, and the reason is size: this is a good eating fish that almost nobody bothers with because most of them are under 6 inches.

Regulations

CDFW rules verified 2026-09-07

Seasonality

Edibility

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.

Spearfishing Brief

Salema are an easy fish to see and a hard fish to take cleanly, and the difficulty comes from size rather than from any caution on their part.

Finding one rates a 2. The schools are common on shallow southern California reefs and they hold in bright water at snorkeling depth, often in or just under the kelp canopy. A diver on the right reef between Santa Monica and the border will pass through salema without looking for them. The 2 rather than a 1 accounts for the northern half of the state, where they thin out sharply above Point Dume and effectively run out above Santa Barbara.

The shot rates a 3. The common length is under 6 inches and the recorded maximum for the species is 11.8 inches, so the target is small, and the fish are inside a dense moving school where a shaft passes between bodies as easily as through one. The habitat compounds it, because a shot taken into kelp or over rock risks the shaft rather than the fish. A polespear handles the range and the target size better than a gun does. There is no published California spearfishing account for salema, so that call is reasoned from the habitat and the size rather than taken from a written account.

The bag limit is the general one, 10 fish inside a 20-fish daily total, because the state does not name salema separately in its regulations at all.

On the table salema are better than their reputation and worse than their size allows. The flesh is mild and firm, which is a step up from the soft-fleshed croakers that share the same coast. The problem is that a 6 inch fish yields very little, so the standard preparation is to pan-fry them whole. Anglers who do not eat them use them for something else: a whole dead salema is a known bait for large sharks at San Diego piers, including sevengill sharks.

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

Beaches whose habitats match this species

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