We found the marine life of Malta strikingly different to what we are used to at home. I like to think that we are pretty good at finding things, because diving in Cape Town sometimes requires a beady eye, patience, and willingness to stare at what seems like barren sand. To both me and Tony the marine life of Malta seemed far less prolific than we are accustomed to in South Africa, and certainly there are not many invertebrates – in terms of both number of species and biomass – at all. The warm, clean water, which is devoid of plankton, probably does not support the dense aggregations of life that we are used to in the Cape.
Here is a summary of pretty much all the different invertebrates we did see. (You should note that I didn’t have twenty pictures of each creature to choose from… In the ten dives, I saw one hermit crab, one sea squirt, and ONE sea cucumber. Not one sea anemone – though apparently they are there somewhere. Imagine that!)
Nudibranchs
Worms
We saw lots of fireworms, which have erectile bristles that will break off in your skin if you touch them, and cause irritation because they contain a toxic substance. They move just like centipedes, and occasionally form feeding aggregations – I didn’t get a photo of one, but Tony has some on video.
We also saw a lot of tube worms, some even inside the cave and tunnels we swam through. On the deeper wrecks and less disturbed sites we found very large specimens.
Crabs
Urchins
We saw a few different kinds of sea urchin, but I don’t have scientific names for them…
Sea cucumbers
Sea stars
We can’t move an inch in Cape waters without landing on a sea star, whereas in Malta I think I saw five starfish (individual specimens, not kinds) in ten dives. I was thus disproportionately excited when I did find them!
This next one is interesting – we find huge numbers of spiny sea stars at home, and I seem to recall reading that they are in fact a European “import”.
Ascidians
I say “ascidians”, but this is the only one I saw.
