They've never found a single person who ate croaker from the Palos Verdes. If the government wins in court, it will use the money to create artificial reefs so white croaker and other fish have a cleaner home. And they will continue their efforts to help the bald eagles and peregrine falcons. To this day, bald eagles on Catalina Island, about 20 miles away, cannot successfully reproduce on their own. Their eggshells are damaged by DDT that the adults have ingested, so the chicks die in their nests.
Biologists think the eagles are getting the DDT from sea gulls and dead seals they eat.
The sea gulls and seals get the DDT, the thinking goes, from white croakers and other fish. To counter this, scientists have been taking the thin-shelled eagle eggs, bringing them to special incubators at zoos, and attempting to rear them. They also bring in clean eggs taken from other eagle nests around California. The program has been long, difficult and only modestly successful. The EPA is experimenting to see if the DDT dump can be capped with clean sand dredged from the mouth of the Long Beach harbor.