Brown meagre (Sciaena umbra) — spearfishing in Morocco

01 Telling it apart

A deep, high-backed fish, dark bronze to brown with a strong metallic sheen, and a curved back that drops steeply to a small mouth set low under the snout. The lower fins are bright yellow with black edges, and the long dorsal has a raised spiny front lobe. The tail is broad and almost square.

It hangs still in the shade of an overhang or a cave mouth, in a small group, all heads facing out. The yellow fins in the shadow are what you see first.

It is unmistakable once seen: nothing else on this coast is this dark, this deep-bodied and this still.

02 Habitat

Caves, overhangs and dark cracks in rock, and the shaded side of large boulders, from a few metres down. It also uses seagrass edges at dusk to feed.

It is sedentary: a group lives in the same shelter for years and returns to it every day. That fidelity is what makes it so easy to find, and so easy to remove.

By day it is in the shade, barely moving. At dusk it comes out to hunt crustaceans and small fish over the bottom nearby.

03 Where to find it in Morocco

Rocky coasts, above all the Mediterranean shore from Saïdia to Tangier. Present but scarcer on the Atlantic rock.

The species is the classic indicator of a protected zone in the Mediterranean: where diving is banned it is abundant and large, where spearfishing is allowed it is rare and small. There is no Moroccan population study; what is known comes from France, Spain and Italy.

04 Spawning

Summer, from May to August. During the season the males drum with their swim bladder, a deep croak audible underwater, and groups gather in the same shelters they use all year.

Growth is slow. A 40 cm fish is well over ten years old.

05 Behaviour

It does not flee. A brown meagre confronted with a diver retreats a little deeper into its shelter and waits, heads out, fins spread. That is the whole problem: it is the easiest fish on the coast to shoot, and a shelter found is a shelter that can be emptied in a single season.

It is loud in summer and easy to locate by sound, and it is faithful to its shelter for life.

Why we give no technique

We know how this species is shot. It is easy, which is precisely the problem, and explaining it on a page beginners read would speed up what we are trying to slow down. If you meet one, look at it.

What people get wrong

01 That because it is not in the size table it is free to take. The table is a commercial list from 1988, silent on most protected species.
02 That a group that lets you close is a healthy population. It lets everyone close; that is why it has vanished from most of the fished Mediterranean.
03 That it is a small fish. It reaches 70 cm and thirty years, and the big ones are what the shelters have lost.

Do not confuse it with

The species this one is taken for, and what tells them apart.

Shi drum, Umbrina cirrosa — silver with oblique wavy gold lines, a small barbel under the chin, and a habit of sand rather than caves.
Meagre, Argyrosomus regius — a much bigger, slimmer, silver fish of open water and sand, not of dark rock.
Dusky grouper, Epinephelus marginatus — also brown and also in holes, but with a huge mouth, a mottled pattern and no yellow fins.

Brown meagre