"Do Not Eat" Fish Advisory: Santa Monica Pier to Seal Beach Pier, Explained

A photo of a red "Do Not Eat" sign on Seal Beach Pier is making the rounds in pier fishing groups this week. The warning is real, but it isn't new. Here's which five fish it covers, why they're contaminated, what you can still keep, and what it means if you fish farther south.

The sign lists five fish in English, Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese: white croaker, topsmelt, barracuda, barred sand bass and black croaker, with a map shading the coast red from Santa Monica Pier down to Seal Beach Pier. Shared without context, it reads like breaking news. It's actually one of the longest-running public health warnings on the Southern California coast.

Is this a new warning?

No. Local health officials first warned anglers about white croaker in 1985. In 2009, California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) expanded the advice to five species after testing more than 1,300 fish from Ventura, Los Angeles and Orange County waters. The four-language signs you're seeing went up at piers in 2011 through the Fish Contamination Education Collaborative, a partnership led by the U.S. EPA with state and county agencies and groups like Heal the Bay.

So if you've been eating croaker off the pier for years, nothing changed this week. What the viral post does show is how many anglers still haven't heard about it.

Exactly what the advisory says

The advice depends on who's eating the fish. Women of childbearing age and kids are more sensitive to these chemicals, so the rules are stricter for them.

What you can still eat from the red zone

The advisory isn't a blanket "don't eat anything" order. For women 18-45 and kids, OEHHA lists jacksmelt as fine up to four times a week; corbina, opaleye, Pacific chub mackerel, queenfish, surfperches and yellowfin croaker up to twice a week; and halibut, kelp bass (calico), rockfish, sardines, sargo, scorpionfish and shovelnose guitarfish once a week. Limits are looser for men and women over 45. One serving is about 6 ounces cooked for an adult, roughly half that for a young child.

One rule people miss: don't stack categories. If you eat a once-a-week fish, that's your fish for the week.

Why these fish? The Palos Verdes Shelf

The red zone is centered on one of the largest DDT contamination sites in the world. From 1953 to 1971, waste from the Montrose Chemical plant in Torrance, the country's largest DDT maker, ran through the Los Angeles County sewer system and out an ocean outfall off Palos Verdes. EPA estimates roughly 110 tons of DDT ended up in the sediment on the Palos Verdes Shelf, which is now a federal Superfund site. PCBs from other industrial sources came along with it.

DDT and PCBs don't dissolve easily. They stick to mud and build up in fat. That's why the list leans toward fish that live and feed near the bottom and don't travel far: white croaker are the textbook example, feeding over the contaminated shelf their whole lives. Levels have been slowly dropping, but a 2024 EPA reassessment found they're still above cleanup targets in sediment and fish tissue.

Black croaker and barracuda are a different story. Their main problem is mercury, which builds up in longer-lived predators. That's also why the advice for those two applies not just to the red zone but from Ventura Harbor all the way to San Mateo Point near San Clemente.

What's happened in the last six months

The pier signs are old, but the larger DDT story off Los Angeles is very much in the news right now.

• A new bill in Congress. On September 24, Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Salud Carbajal introduced the Ocean Protection and DDT Reduction Act. It would make NOAA the lead agency for mapping DDT contamination in the San Pedro Basin, tracking how it moves into fish and wildlife, and testing cleanup ideas like bioremediation, with $6 million a year in authorized funding over seven years. The Los Angeles Times reported that as many as 500,000 barrels of toxic waste may have been dumped off Southern California after World War II.
• No guaranteed cleanup. Patch noted the bill funds research only and still has to be paid for by Congress, while EPA continues its feasibility study for a final remedy on the Palos Verdes Shelf after shelving an earlier sediment-capping plan.
• Scientists warn the work could stall. UCSB's David Valentine, whose team helped uncover the deep-water dumpsite, told the Santa Barbara Independent his funding runs out in about a year and that without more, the research comes to "a grinding halt."
• Deeper contamination than the Superfund site. As Parade recapped, Scripps surveys found sediments in the San Pedro Basin with DDT levels higher than the Palos Verdes Shelf itself, and earlier work detected DDT compounds in deep-sea fish there.
• A record-warm ocean. Scripps Pier set a record water temperature for the date in October, with a strong El Niño building, as CBS 8 reported. Warm water shifts where fish feed and congregate, which is one more reason to know which species and spots carry advisories before you keep a fish. More on that in our El Niño clear-water guide.

Fishing in San Diego? Here's what applies to you

The red zone stops at Seal Beach Pier. Open-coast fish from Orange County south to the Mexican border fall under California's 2016 statewide coastal advisory instead, which is based on mercury and PCBs rather than the Palos Verdes DDT plume. Under that advice, women 18-45 and kids shouldn't eat shark or four rockfish species (black-and-yellow, China, copper and gopher), and other species have weekly limits. San Diego Bay and Mission Bay have their own separate advice, so check those before keeping fish caught inside the bays.

If you're crossing into Baja waters, California advisories don't apply there, but neither does any equivalent pier signage. Mercury in big predators is a coast-wide issue, so the same common sense applies.

Frequently asked questions

Can I eat fish from the Santa Monica Pier?

Some, yes. Santa Monica Pier sits at the northern edge of the red zone. Avoid the five listed species and follow the weekly limits for everything else.

Does cooking remove DDT or mercury?

Cooking methods that let fat drain off reduce DDT and PCBs. Nothing you do in the kitchen removes mercury.

Is store-bought white croaker safe?

The advisory covers sport-caught fish, not market fish. Commercial fishing for white croaker is restricted near the Palos Verdes Shelf.

Where can I check the official advice?

Scan the QR code on the sign or visit pvsfish.org. For any other California water body, OEHHA's fish advisory map has species-by-species guidance.

More from the blog: Why San Diego's water is so clear right now · San Diego spearfishing spots and conditions · Grunion run season in San Diego