Two-banded seabream (Diplodus vulgaris) — spearfishing in Morocco

01 Telling it apart

A silver-grey seabream with exactly two dark bands: a wide one across the nape, just behind the head and reaching down over the pectoral base, and a second around the tail wrist. Between them the flank is plain, often with a faint golden wash and thin gold lines along the scale rows.

Compared with the white seabream it is slimmer, the bands are broad rather than narrow, and it is more often seen in a group of ten to fifty than alone.

The two bands are visible on tiny juveniles and stay sharp on adults, so they work at distance where the white seabream’s narrow bars have already blurred.

02 Habitat

Rock and seagrass, usually a little deeper and a little calmer than the white seabream: the base of a wall, the mixed zone where rock breaks up into sand and weed, boulder slopes at 10 to 30 m. It follows the outer edge of a reef and drifts over open sand between rocks.

It feeds on the bottom, on worms, small crustaceans and molluscs, and a school working a patch of sand and weed is a common sight.

It tolerates surge but does not seek it. Where the white seabream is in the white water, this one is a few metres below and outside it.

03 Where to find it in Morocco

The whole coast. Abundant on the Mediterranean side, where it is often the most numerous seabream on a rock; common on the Atlantic rock from Tangier to the Sahara.

No Moroccan study has published its maturity or spawning season. The figures here come from the Algarve and the western Mediterranean, which is the closest water anyone has measured.

04 Spawning

Autumn to early winter: October to January in the Algarve and the western Mediterranean, peaking in November and December.

Schools tighten over the spawning ground in that window. It is the easiest time to find them and the worst time to take many.

05 Behaviour

A schooling fish. Groups of ten to a few hundred move over the bottom and lift off it when disturbed, then settle again a little further on. That makes it easy to find and easy to approach, and it makes the choice of target the whole skill: a shot into the school wounds fish without landing one.

It is less wary than the white seabream and will hold at a few metres from a still diver, but the big individuals keep to the back of the school and leave first.

It comes back. A school that lifts off a patch settles on the same patch a minute later if nothing chases it.

How you approach it

Ambush on mixed bottom: rock breaking into sand and weed. The school works a circuit and returns to the same patch; wait on it rather than chasing.
Pick one fish and follow it with the spear, never the middle of the school. A shot into the mass wounds two and lands none.
The largest fish are at the back of the school and leave first. If you want size, wait for the school to pass and take what follows it.
A mid-length gun, 75 to 90 cm, is plenty: ranges are short and the fish is not large.
Do not chase a school that has lifted. Stay down, stay still, and let it settle back.

What people get wrong

01 That it is a small fish not worth the care. It reaches 45 cm, and the old fish in a school are the ones producing the eggs.
02 That the two bands mean a juvenile white seabream. The white seabream has narrow bars all along the flank at every age; this one never does.
03 That a school that lifts is gone. It settles back on the same ground within minutes if it is not chased.

Do not confuse it with

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

White seabream, Diplodus sargus — five to nine narrow bars along the flank and a black tail saddle, no wide nape band.
Zebra seabream, Diplodus cervinus — four or five broad bars spread evenly along a much deeper, larger fish.
Annular seabream, Diplodus annularis — smaller, yellowish, with a single ring at the tail base and nothing on the nape.
Saddled seabream, Oblada melanura — a slimmer, more silver fish with one black saddle ringed in white at the tail base and nothing on the nape.