Mediterranean parrotfish

The only parrotfish you will meet in Maltese water, and the colours run the opposite way to the tropics. The bright ones are the females and young fish: brick red to scarlet over most of the body, with a pale grey saddle across the back behind the head, a yellow patch behind the eye and a red tail. The males are the drab ones, a plain grey-brown all over with a slightly darker head. Both have the same stubby, deep body and the fused beak-like front teeth the family is named for.

It grazes algae and turf off bare limestone, and you can often hear it before you see it - a dry scraping click as the beak works the rock. It moves in a stop-start way, nipping at a boulder, jinking a metre or two, then nipping again, usually alone or in twos and threes. Typical fish are 25 to 30 cm, and a big one is about half a metre.

Around Malta, Gozo and Comino it lives on shallow rocky reef, boulder slopes and the rocky edges of Posidonia meadows, from a couple of metres down to about thirty. It is a warm-water species and has been becoming steadily more common and more widespread in the central Mediterranean as the sea has warmed, so shallow snorkel-depth sightings that were once a novelty are now routine in late summer.