Peacock wrasse

The largest of the Symphodus wrasses in the Mediterranean and a fish most Maltese divers see on every seagrass dive without ever putting a name to it. It has a fairly deep, laterally flattened body, a noticeably pointed snout and thick lips. The usual colour is olive to greenish-brown with rows of small dark spots and blotches along the flanks, a pale belly and a dark smudge on the tail base. Breeding males go far brighter, with blue and green lines scribbled across the head and cheeks and a stronger black blotch behind the gill cover.

Most fish you meet are 20 to 25 cm; the record is over 40 cm, which for a wrasse is substantial. It picks its way slowly along the bottom crunching small urchins, brittlestars, bivalves, shrimp and crabs with its heavy jaws, so it is often found nosing among the roots at the edge of a meadow.

Around Malta, Gozo and Comino it is common between about two and thirty metres wherever Posidonia meets rock, and it is one of the species that makes the shallow bays at Ġnejna, Xlendi and Mġarr ix-Xini worth a slow look. In spring the male gathers loose algae into a nest on the bottom and guards it for weeks while several females spawn in it.