Comber

The comber is the painted comber's slimmer, paler cousin and a small member of the grouper family. The body is elongated and gently tapered, with a pointed head and a sizeable mouth, and the background colour is pale sandy pink to reddish brown. Across it run seven to nine faint dark vertical bars, and along it run two or three horizontal orange to yellow-brown stripes, so the flank ends up with a criss-cross pattern that no other small Maltese fish shows. There are usually two or three curved white or yellowish bands on the cheek. Maltese fish are commonly 15 to 25 cm and can reach about 40 cm.

Combers cover a huge depth range, from about 5 metres down past 300, which means divers meet them almost everywhere but see the most at 15 to 60 metres on the lower parts of reefs, on rubble and coarse sand at the foot of walls, over Posidonia edges and around wrecks such as the Um El Faroud, P29 and Rozi. They perch on the bottom, often in the open, and are famously unbothered by divers. Like the painted comber they are simultaneous hermaphrodites, and they feed on small fish, crustaceans and cephalopods, hunting most actively around dusk.

Because they are curious, combers often become the fish that follows you around a sandy patch, hovering just off your fin tips and darting in whenever something moves in the sediment.