Ornate wrasse

A small, slim, restless wrasse and probably the most colourful fish a snorkeller will see in Malta. Females and young fish are greenish or brownish with a row of narrow pale blue-green vertical bars down the flanks and a dark spot on the middle of the dorsal fin. Large males drop the bars and take on a blue-green head crossed by orange and yellow bands behind the eye, a broad orange-red saddle behind the head and a blue-edged tail.

It rarely stops. Expect a fish that flicks its pectoral fins like little oars, hovers for a second at arm's length to look at you, then darts off along the rock. Most are 12 to 15 cm; 25 cm is about the ceiling. It picks small snails, crabs and shrimp off the rock and follows octopus, moray and divers around in the hope that something edible gets turned over.

Around the Maltese islands it is everywhere on shallow rocky reef, boulder ground and the rocky edges of seagrass, from the surface down to about thirty metres, though the brightest concentrations are in the top ten. It is a warm-water fish and has become dramatically more abundant in the central Mediterranean over recent decades as the sea has warmed.