🐟 Fish · Sciaena umbra

Brown meagre

Gurbellin Maltese, also Gurbell tork, Għarab, Għarbi

The dark cave fish that drums at dusk

Harmless Protected in Malta 35 cm, up to 70 cm 3 to 40 mrocky reefcaves and overhangsseagrass

Meet the Brown meagre

A stocky, high-backed fish in bronze and near-black, with a metallic sheen that flickers copper when a torch catches it. The first dorsal fin is tall and triangular, the tail squared off, and the pelvic and anal fins carry a clean white leading edge that is often the first thing you notice in a dim cave. The chin has a cluster of tiny pores rather than a barbel. Most Maltese fish are between 25 and 40 cm; 70 cm is about the upper limit anywhere in the Mediterranean.

Brown meagre are creatures of shade. By day they hang almost motionless inside caves, under big overhangs and in the deep shadow at the base of boulder slopes, usually in small loose groups that all face the same way. At dusk they move out over sand and Posidonia to hunt worms, small crustaceans and fish. Around Malta and Gozo they turn up from about 3 m down to 40 m, with the reliable spots being the cave systems and boulder rubble along the north-west coast, Gozo's inshore cliffs and the deeper overhangs on Comino.

They are among the loudest fish in the Mediterranean. Males drum with muscles against the swim bladder, and on a summer evening a cave full of them produces a continuous low knocking chorus that freedivers and night divers can hear clearly through the water.

When to look: All year, but best in summer at dusk, when groups gather at cave mouths and the males start drumming.

Diving with them

Look into the darkest part of a cave or overhang rather than at the reef face; they hover in mid-water inside the shadow, not on the rock
Keep your torch beam low and to one side, a beam straight into the group pushes them further back every time
Approach slowly and diagonally, stop, and let them settle; they will often drift back out to within a couple of metres
For photography, expose for the dark background and use a soft off-camera strobe so the white fin edges do not blow out
Night dives are the real reward, they come right out over the sand and are far less shy
If you hear a rhythmic knocking on a summer evening dive, stop and search the nearest cave mouth

Can it hurt you?Harmless

Completely harmless to divers. It has no venom and no interest in you, and its instinct is to retreat deeper into the cave.

Easily confused with

Shi drum (Umbrina cirrosa), which is paler with slanting golden stripes and a short stiff barbel on the chin
Black seabream (Spondyliosoma cantharus), which is slimmer, more silver-grey and has a forked tail rather than a squared one
Small dusky grouper in shadow, but a grouper has a rounded fan-shaped tail and a much larger mouth