Seabreams
White seabream
Diplodus sargus
The Moroccan spearo’s fish. Everywhere, curious, wary, and rarely where you expect it.
Seabreams
Diplodus sargus
The Moroccan spearo’s fish. Everywhere, curious, wary, and rarely where you expect it.
The legal size is set by order no. 1154-88 as amended — below it, fishing, transporting, buying or selling the species is prohibited. See the full table.
What the legal size does not tell you
The legal size comes from the 1988 order, written for commercial fishing. The maturity sizes come from scientific studies, each carried out in one particular area: they give an order of magnitude, not a rule.
A deep, oval, silver seabream with a black saddle across the tail base and a row of narrow dark vertical bars down the flank. The bars are what settle it: five to nine of them, sharp on a fresh fish, fading on big old ones but never gone. The mouth is small, with flat cutting teeth in front.
At distance it reads as a bright, flat-sided oval that hangs in the surge and turns to show you its side. It swims with the head slightly down and stops often.
Young fish are silver with the bars already visible from a few centimetres long.
A fish of hard, exposed ground: rock washed by waves, boulder fields, the foot of a cliff, the edge of a reef where it meets sand or seagrass. It likes moving water and settles in the white water where the swell breaks on rock, feeding on the mussels, limpets and small crabs the surf keeps loose.
The productive ground is where the surge works: the outside of a point, the mouth of a gully, the boulder line at the base of a wall. Calm, deep, featureless rock holds fewer and smaller fish.
Almost every encounter is inside 15 m. It goes deeper in winter and on very calm days, but a diver working the first line of rock in a bit of swell meets more of them than one at 25 m.
The whole coast, both seaboards. Densest on the rocky Mediterranean shore and on the Atlantic between Cap Ghir and Sidi Ifni, where long stretches of exposed rock give it exactly the ground it wants.
Sheltered ports and estuaries hold the juveniles; the adults are on open rock.
Nothing has been published on its maturity or spawning from Moroccan water. The figures on this sheet are Mediterranean, mostly from the Gulf of Tunis and the Spanish coast, and are used here as the working assumption.
Late winter to spring, earlier in the south and on the Mediterranean side. In the studied populations the season runs from February to May.
Big fish gather during that window and become easier to find, which is exactly why it is the worst time to lean on a spot. A protandrous species keeps its egg production in its largest fish.
It lives in small groups with a clear pecking order. The big sar is almost always alone or in a pair, on the edge of the group, and it has seen you before you see it.
Its defining trait is curiosity mixed with wariness: it comes to look at a diver who is still, from the edge of visibility, and it leaves at the first head turn. A fish that has decided to come will come on its own line; a fish you move towards is gone.
It is bolder in surge. The noise and the moving white water cover a diver, and the fish are busy feeding rather than watching.
The species this one is taken for, and what tells them apart.
Two-banded seabream
Diplodus vulgaris
Zebra seabream
Diplodus cervinus
European seabass
Dicentrarchus labrax
Gilthead seabream
Sparus aurata
Apart from the legal size, which comes from the order cited under regulations, this sheet describes the general biology of the species and common practice — not measurements taken on the Moroccan coast. Spawning periods differ from one coast to the other. If you know better, put us right.
Biology FishBase — Diplodus sargus · IUCN Red List — Diplodus sargus · DORIS (FFESSM) — sar commun · Mouine et al. 2007, Journal of Fish Biology — reproduction of D. sargus in the Gulf of Tunis · read on 14 September 2026
