Blennies

Blennies are the small, blunt-headed fish that sit propped on their pelvic fins in a hole in the rock and stare at you. They have a scaleless, slightly rubbery body, one long dorsal fin running almost the whole length of the back, high-set bulging eyes and, in most Maltese species, branched tentacles above the eyes that look like small feathery eyebrows. Colours are browns, olives and creams in bars and mottling, though breeding males often flush much darker and brighter.

Three are worth knowing around Malta and Gozo. The tompot blenny, Parablennius gattorugine, is the big one at up to about 20 cm here, reddish-brown with broad dark bars and thick branched head tentacles, and it lives in holes on rocky reef from a few metres to thirty. The striped blenny, Parablennius rouxi, is tiny and unmistakable: pale cream with one crisp black stripe from snout to tail, usually looking out of an abandoned worm tube. The rusty blenny, Parablennius sanguinolentus, is a chunky green-brown fish of the surge zone in the top few metres, often in rock pools. Divers also lump in the black-faced blenny, Tripterygion delaisi, which is really a triplefin, and in summer the males are impossible to miss, bright yellow with a jet-black head, perched on shaded vertical rock and cave roofs.

All of them are territorial homebodies. A blenny you find today will be in the same crack next month, which makes them the best subjects in Malta for practising slow approach and macro work.