Comber

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When it is sleeping, its vertical bands become much paler but are still visible.

The comber is usually brick red to russet yellow in colour, with a salmon pink belly. It has 7 to 9 dark vertical bands crossed by one white stripe. This solitary, territorial fish is a voracious predator that feeds on fish, cephalopods, crustaceans and worms. It measures about 20cm, 40 at most, and lives down to 500m deep on all types of seabeds with a preference for rocky bottoms. It is found all over the Mediterranean including the Black Sea. In the Atlantic, they occur from the British Isles to Cabo Verde.