🐟 Fish · Diplodus sargus
White seabream
Sarguin Maltese, also Sargu komuni
Bright silver with a row of dark bars
Meet the White seabream
A high-backed, strongly compressed silver seabream, noticeably more mirror-bright than its relatives, with a row of dark vertical bars down the flanks: usually five broader bars alternating with narrower ones, though they fade almost to nothing when the fish is calm. There is a solid black saddle on the tail stalk and a black edge to the tail, and the small mouth carries protruding, almost horse-like front teeth.
White seabream like moving water. They are most often seen in twos and threes or in loose shoals in the surge zone, over boulders and shallow rocky ground where waves break, grazing algae and crunching small molluscs and urchins with those front teeth. Around Malta and Gozo they are a shallow-water fish of the first 20 m, though they also turn up deeper on reef edges, and they are a familiar sight on shore-dive entries at Ċirkewwa, Ras il-Ħobż and the Blue Hole.
Sargu is the everyday Maltese name and is also used loosely for the other Diplodus breams; the Malta minimum landing size for sargu is 23 cm.
When to look: All year in the shallows, and most active in choppy conditions and at the surge line where food is being knocked loose.
Diving with them
- Look in the white water and surge close to shore on the way out and back, not on the deep part of the dive
- They are warier than two-banded seabream, so stay low and let the surge move you instead of finning after them
- The bars are the giveaway but come and go with mood, so look also for the black saddle on the tail stalk
- Good subjects for shallow, sunlit wide-angle shots with the surface texture in frame
- Watch them crunching limpets and small urchins off the rock, which often leaves fragments for wrasse to scavenge
Can it hurt you?Harmless
Harmless. The strong front teeth are for scraping shells off rock and are no threat to a diver.
Easily confused with
- Two-banded seabream (Diplodus vulgaris, Xirgien) has a broad black collar behind the head instead of flank bars
- Sharpsnout seabream (Diplodus puntazzo) has a distinctly pointed snout and more numerous narrow bars
- Zebra seabream (Diplodus cervinus) is bigger with far broader chocolate-brown bars
Where to meet them: 3 sites
Il Mara
Malta
Further reading: FishBase – Diplodus sargus · EU fish commercial names – Maltese designation for Diplodus sargus sargus · Maltese minimum fish size restrictions (Sargu 23 cm) · Wikipedia – Diplodus sargus