Saddled seabream

A slim, elegant silver fish, more streamlined than the deep-bodied Diplodus breams, blue-grey along the back and bright silver on the flanks with faint darker lines. Its name comes from the mark at the base of the tail: a clean oval black blotch fringed above and below with white, like a small saddle. The eye is large, the mouth is small and slightly upturned, and the tail is deeply forked.

Unlike most breams, the kaħlija spends its time in mid-water rather than on the bottom. Loose shoals of a few dozen drift and circle a metre or two above rocky reef and seagrass, feeding on plankton, small crustaceans and drifting weed, and they will happily orbit a diver at a polite distance. Around Malta, Gozo and Comino they are common from just below the surface down to about 30 m, and they are one of the standard sights over shallow reef at Ċirkewwa and around Comino.

This is the fish that properly owns the Maltese name kaħlija (plural kaħli). Some Maltese site notes give kaħlija to the damselfish instead, probably because kaħal means blue and juvenile damselfish are electric blue, but Maltese reference works put kaħli with Oblada melanura and ċawl with Chromis chromis.