🐟 Fish · Sarpa salpa

Salema

Xilpain Maltese, also Xilp, Gerwiela, Salpa

Gold-striped grazer drifting over the meadow

Harmless 28 cm, up to 51 cm 1 to 25 mseagrassrocky reefshallow baysboulders

Meet the Salema

A neat oval seabream, silver-grey with around ten fine golden-yellow lines running the length of the body and a small dark spot at the base of the pectoral fin. The head is small with a blunt snout and a low-set mouth, and the eye is dark and unremarkable. Females grow larger than males; typical fish are 25 to 30 cm and the maximum is around half a metre.

It is one of the very few Mediterranean fish that genuinely eats plants, cropping Posidonia leaves and algae off rock, and you will often watch a shoal working slowly across a meadow, all tilted nose-down together. The shoals can be anything from a dozen fish to well over a hundred, and they are unbothered enough by divers that you can drift along inside one.

Around the Maltese islands it is common in shallow bays, over seagrass and along rocky shorelines from a metre or two down to about twenty-five, and it is one of the fish you are almost guaranteed to see off Ġnejna, Għadira, Xlendi and the shallow end of most shore dives. It is caught and sold locally but has never been especially prized on the Maltese table.

When to look: All year, with the biggest shallow shoals through summer and early autumn; grazing is a daylight activity.

Diving with them

Do not chase the shoal - match its pace and let it flow past you, and it will close up around you
Watch for the synchronised nose-down grazing posture over Posidonia; it is one of the better bits of behaviour to film in Malta
The gold stripes only show properly in shallow natural light or with a strobe; below fifteen metres the fish looks plain silver
Good practice subject for shoal photography because it is slow, predictable and tolerant
Its grazing scars on seagrass leaves are worth a look even when the fish have moved on

Can it hurt you?Harmless

Harmless in the water. It has no spines or venom of any consequence and ignores divers completely.

Easily confused with

Bogue (Boops boops) - slimmer and rounder in section with a much larger eye and fainter stripes
Striped seabream (Lithognathus mormyrus) - vertical dark bars instead of horizontal gold lines
Saddled seabream (Oblada melanura) - plain silver with a black saddle at the tail