Zebra seabream (Diplodus cervinus) — spearfishing in Morocco

01 Telling it apart

A large, deep, heavy-shouldered seabream with four or five broad dark bands spaced evenly down a pale flank, like a zebra. The bands are wide, roughly as wide as the pale gaps, and they run from the back down past the midline. The head is blunt, the eye large, the mouth small with a thick lip.

It is unmistakable close up. At distance and in poor light it can pass for a big white seabream, but the bands are few and wide where the white seabream’s are many and thin, and a zebra of any size is deeper-bodied than a sar of the same length.

It is usually deeper than the other sars, and usually alone.

02 Habitat

Deep rock: walls, big boulders and stone fields from 15 m down, with a preference for structure that has holes and overhangs to retreat into. It is more solitary and more sedentary than the other sars, and a big one holds the same stretch of wall for years.

It feeds on the bottom on sea urchins, molluscs and crustaceans, and it is often seen head-down against the rock.

Exposed Atlantic points and deep Mediterranean walls both hold it. It is rarely in the surge zone where the white seabream lives.

03 Where to find it in Morocco

Exposed rocky coasts on both seaboards. The Atlantic south, from Essaouira to Sidi Ifni and beyond, produces the large individuals, on deep walls and offshore stone fields.

Nothing has been published from Moroccan water. The Canary Islands study, on the same Atlantic stock, is the closest measurement and the source of the age and maturity figures here.

04 Spawning

Spring, with wide local variation. In the Canaries the season runs from roughly February to June.

This is a slow-growing fish that matures late, at five or six years, and lives twenty. A large zebra is old, and it is not replaced in a couple of seasons.

05 Behaviour

Wary, territorial, and usually alone or in a pair. It does not tolerate disturbance: a diver descending noisily on its wall sends it into a hole or off the drop, and it does not come back while the diver is there.

It is met most often at the end of a long wait, after the diver has been still for a good while, when it comes out of its cover and moves along the base of the wall. It rarely comes to inspect a diver the way a white seabream does.

Slow growth and site fidelity together mean a wall that is fished hard for a season stays empty of big zebras for years.

How you approach it

A long, silent wait on a deep spot, at the edge of visibility, facing the base of the wall. It comes out when it has decided you are part of the rock.
Descend slowly and quietly, and settle without a fin kick. This fish leaves at the first sound of a fin on stone.
Expect it late in the wait, not early. The first minute shows you the white seabream; the fourth shows you the zebra.
A mid-length gun, 90 to 100 cm, with a good shaft: ranges are longer than in the surge and the fish is heavy.
Do not follow a fish into a hole. A zebra that has gone in stays in, and a diver at a hole entrance holds nothing but his breath.

What people get wrong

01 That it is a big white seabream. The bands are few and broad, not many and narrow, and the body is deeper for its length.
02 That a fish this common on a market is common on the rock. It is the rarest of the sars underwater, and the big ones are old.
03 That it lives where the white seabream lives. It is usually deeper and calmer, at the base of a wall, not in the surge.

Do not confuse it with

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

White seabream, Diplodus sargus — many narrow bars and a black tail saddle, on a smaller and shallower fish.
Two-banded seabream, Diplodus vulgaris — only two bands, one on the nape and one at the tail, with a plain flank between.
Sheepshead seabream, Archosargus probatocephalus — an American species that does not occur here; the name confusion is in English only.