Spearfishing Stats

Taxonomy

Rarity

White croaker are one of the most abundant fish on the California coast and one of the least wanted. Almost every oceanfront pier in southern and central California lists them as the number one fish caught, or close to it. Recreational anglers landed an average of 520,000 of them a year between 1996 and 2003, and roughly 195,000 a year between 2004 and 2009 once the survey method changed. They are easy to catch, they take almost any bait, and they arrive in schools, which is why pier anglers gave them names like tomcod, sewer trout and brown bait.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature assessed the species in 2019 and lists it as Least Concern. California's own read is less settled. The Department of Fish and Wildlife says the population size is not known, and 3 separate lines of evidence point down. A beach seine survey run along the open southern California coast from 2007 through 2009 caught far fewer white croaker per unit of effort than a comparable survey from 1953 through 1956. Power plant entrainment studies show abundance falling since the late 1970s. Egg hatching is poor in very warm water years, which explains part of that, but catches did not recover during the cooler years that followed.

Regulations

CDFW rules verified 2026-09-07

Seasonality

Edibility

Location

White croaker range from Barkley Sound in British Columbia to Bahia Magdalena in southern Baja California. They are abundant from San Francisco south to central Baja California, common in Humboldt Bay, and rare north of Point Reyes in northern California. This is a soft-bottom fish. It holds over sand and mud rather than rock, in the ocean and inside larger bays, sloughs and lagoons, and it has been recorded from the surf zone down to about 780 feet. Most of the time the fish are between 10 and 100 feet, and they are sometimes fairly abundant as deep as 300 feet.

They travel in schools, so a diver who finds one has found many. The schools often sit alongside queenfish, and the 2 species stack: queenfish hold at mid-depth while white croaker hold nearer the bottom. That layering is a useful thing to know, because the 2 fish look similar at a glance and are constantly confused for one another.

Feeding is a night job. White croaker are omnivores that roam the bottom after dark eating worms, shrimps, crabs, squid, octopuses, clams, small fishes, and dead material, with some midwater feeding during the day. That habit is the root of every problem the species has with people, and it is covered below. They are eaten in turn by a long list of animals: Brandt's and double-crested cormorants, seals, sea lions, dolphins, and many fish including barred sand bass, California lizardfish, California halibut, giant sea bass, Pacific bluefin tuna and various sharks.

Spearfishing Brief

White croaker are the easiest fish in this Ichthyopedia to find and among the least rewarding to take, and both halves of that are worth stating plainly.

Finding one rates a 1. They are abundant, they school, and they hold over open sand in shallow water within reach of any shore dive along the southern California coast. A diver does not search for white croaker. A diver swims over sand and they are there.

The shot rates a 2. The fish are small, most of them under 10 inches in southern California, and a small target in the low-visibility water that sits over sand is harder to hit than the same fish would be on a clear reef. They are not wary and they do not run, so the difficulty is entirely about size and water clarity. A polespear or a short speargun suits the range. No published California spearfishing account exists for this species, which is a hook-and-line pier and small-boat fish in practice, so that gear call is reasoned from the habitat rather than taken from a written account.

The reason to think twice is contamination, and it is specific rather than general. White croaker feed on the animals living in bottom mud, and mud is where industrial waste settles. Fish taken near marine waste discharges concentrate DDT, its breakdown products, polychlorinated biphenyls, metals including zinc, selenium and mercury, and petroleum products, at levels the state considers hazardous to eat. Some fish in those areas are diseased or malformed, and some show reproductive impairment. The Department of Fish and Wildlife's guidance is that white croaker caught between the Santa Monica Pier and the Seal Beach Pier should not be eaten at all, and that fish caught between Ventura Harbor and the Santa Monica Pier, or from the Seal Beach Pier south to San Mateo Point, should be limited to 1 skinless fillet serving per week. The Fish Contamination Education Collaborative, set up by the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 2003, names white croaker first on a list of 5 species that should not be eaten from the contaminated area, alongside barred sand bass, black croaker, topsmelt and California barracuda. Those figures come from the state's fisheries report and the collaborative's own materials. The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment publishes the live advisory and its website could not be read while this entry was written, so a diver planning to eat one of these fish should check the current advisory directly rather than rely on the serving counts printed here.

On the table, and away from the advisory zone, white croaker are ordinary. The flesh is mild and low in fat, and it is also soft, which is the main complaint against it, along with a moderate smell and a habit of carrying worms and other parasites. Fish from the central California open coast tend to be firmer than fish from warm southern water. Pan-frying and deep-frying are the standard preparations. Market fish are sold under the name kingfish.

Deep Dive

The clearest way to understand white croaker is that they are a common fish that got a reputation from where they live rather than from what they are.

The species is small and slow. The maximum recorded length is 16.3 inches, fish over 12 inches are unusual, and although 4 pound fish have been reported, anything over 2 pounds is extremely rare. They mature fast for a fish that lives 15 years: more than half of both sexes are sexually mature at 1 year old, when males are about 5.5 inches and females about 6 inches. By 3 or 4 years the fish are around 7.5 inches and all of them are mature. Spawning in southern California runs from November through May with a January through March peak, while central California fish spawn all year with 2 peaks. A female spawns 18 to 24 times in a season, roughly every 5 days, releasing between 800 eggs at 6 inches and 37,200 eggs at 10 inches. The eggs float at 25 to 120 feet, the larvae drift at 50 to 75 feet, and as they grow they sink toward the bottom and move toward shore. Juveniles hold near the bottom in 10 to 20 feet of water and move deeper as they mature.

The name in the fish market is kingfish and the name on the pier is often tomcod, and neither is accurate. The scientific name is built from 2 Greek words meaning lower jaw and barbel, which describes the cluster of tiny barbels, the short whisker-like feelers, under the fish's chin. That cluster is the identification feature that separates white croaker from other California croakers, most of which carry 1 larger barbel instead. The other check is a small black spot at the upper base of each pectoral fin, the paired fins just behind the gills.

The contamination story is the reason this fish has a regulation of its own. The Montrose Chemical Corporation made DDT at a plant near Torrance from 1947 to 1983, and its wastewater went into the Los Angeles sewers, which emptied into the ocean off White Point on the Palos Verdes Shelf. Somewhere between 800 and 1,000 tons of DDT went out that pipe between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, and several other industries put polychlorinated biphenyls down the same sewers. The United States Geological Survey mapped 17 square miles of contaminated sea floor. White croaker feed directly on the animals living in that sediment, so they carry the highest contaminant loads of any fish in the area. California issued an interim consumption advisory in 1985 and a final one in 1991, and in 1990 the state closed commercial fishing for white croaker in the 3 miles of water between Point Vicente and Point Fermin. That closure is written to expire on its own: the regulation says it becomes inoperative when the state's health director determines that the risk is gone and notifies the fish and game agency. It has now stood for 36 years.

The rest of the fishery collapsed alongside it, though not only because of the pollution. Commercial landings averaged 154,000 pounds a year between 1996 and 2011, peaking at 529,000 pounds in 1996 and falling to 6,833 pounds in 2011, worth $4,140. Part of that decline traces to the 1994 ban on gill nets within 3 miles of the southern California mainland. On the recreational side, white croaker were unlimited until 1998, when the state folded them into the general 10-fish daily limit. The reason was not conservation. Anglers were taking them on sport licences and selling them into the commercial market.

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.