Gorgonian sea fans

Gorgonians are colonial soft corals that build a flexible horny skeleton and grow it into a flat fan set across the current, with hundreds of tiny eight-tentacled polyps studding every branch. Three species matter to divers here. Paramuricea clavata, the violescent sea fan, is the showpiece: deep red to purple, sometimes with yellow branch tips, growing to a metre tall on shaded rock from around 30 m down. Eunicella cavolini is the yellow one, smaller and more sparsely branched, comfortable from about 20 m. Eunicella singularis, the white gorgonian, is the pale candelabra of shallower, better-lit rock, and the only Mediterranean gorgonian to carry symbiotic algae in its tissue.

Malta and Gozo do not have the dense gorgonian forests of the northwest Mediterranean, but the deep walls deliver. At Reqqa Point the first significant fans appear around 20 to 30 m and the wall turns dark and austere below that; Fungus Rock, the Ras il-Ħobż pinnacle and the drop-offs off Comino and Delimara all carry fans in the 30 to 60 m band, alongside barrel sponges and, deeper still, black corals.

Fans are slow-growing, long-lived and brittle. A colony the height of your forearm may be several decades old, and warm-water summers of the kind the Mediterranean now gets regularly have caused mass die-offs of Paramuricea elsewhere in the basin.