Taxonomy & naming
Campylomormyrus tshokwe belongs to the order Osteoglossiformes, the bonytongues — among the most ancient living lineages of teleost (bony) fishes, named for a toothed bone on the floor of the mouth that bites against toothed plates on the roof, a jaw arrangement found nowhere else. The order radiated across four continents deep in geological time, and today's scattered survivors — South American arowanas and arapaima, Asian arowanas, African butterflyfish and elephantfishes, Australasian saratoga — are relicts of that split, each isolated on its own continent for tens of millions of years. Campylomormyrus tshokwe sits in the African branch, in the family Mormyridae (the elephantfishes) and the genus Campylomormyrus, a group of roughly twenty species restricted to Central and West African rivers and informally called the curved-snout mormyrids for the down-turned rostrum most species carry.
The species was described by the Belgian ichthyologist Max Poll in 1967. The parentheses around the authority, "(Poll, 1967)", signal that Poll's original description placed the fish in a different genus and that it was later reassigned to Campylomormyrus as the genus was revised — a routine bookkeeping change in mormyrid taxonomy, a group whose species are notoriously difficult to tell apart by eye and are increasingly sorted using the electric organ discharge (EOD) waveform as a diagnostic character alongside traditional morphology. The species epithet tshokwe honors the Tshokwe (also spelled Chokwe) people of central Africa, whose traditional territory spans Angola, the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo and parts of Zambia, overlapping the fish's native Kasai-drainage rivers. Campylomormyrus tshokwe has no widely used English common name in the aquarium trade; it is generally known and traded, where it appears at all, under its scientific name.
Morphology
Like all mormyrids, Campylomormyrus tshokwe has an elongated, laterally compressed body, a small mouth, and a scaleless head. The genus's defining feature is its snout: rather than the fleshy chin barbel (the "Schnauzenorgan") carried by the well-known elephantnose Gnathonemus petersii, Campylomormyrus species have the snout itself drawn out into a slender, down-curved tube, with the mouth opening near its tip. Snout length and curvature vary between the roughly twenty Campylomormyrus species and serve as a key character both for identification and, current research suggests, for how each species partitions what it probes for in the substrate. FishBase records this species with 31 dorsal soft rays and 35 anal soft rays, and a maximum recorded size of about 11.6 in total length — a modest, manageable size for a mormyrid.
A slender electric organ runs along the caudal peduncle near the tail, generating a continuous, low-voltage, biphasic electric organ discharge (EOD) that is essentially unique to each species — in many mormyrids the EOD waveform is a more reliable identification tool than external appearance. The signal is read by electroreceptors covering the skin, including a dense patch on the curved snout, letting the fish build a real-time electrical picture of its surroundings in water too dark, turbid or vegetated for vision to be much use. Processing that constant stream of electrosensory information is thought to be part of why mormyrids carry one of the largest brain-to-body mass ratios of any fish, with a notably enlarged cerebellum — earning the family a reputation among researchers as unusually "intelligent" fish, though the intelligence label here mostly reflects the sheer sensory-processing load of electrolocation rather than anything comparable to mammalian cognition.
Habitat
Campylomormyrus tshokwe is known from the Kwango and Luachimo rivers, tributaries within the Kasai drainage of the middle Congo River basin, with records spanning the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola. It is a demersal freshwater fish, living and foraging near the bottom rather than in open water.
Detailed limnological data for this specific stretch of the Kasai drainage is not well documented, but it sits within the wider Congo basin pattern that shaped mormyrid biology in the first place: warm, slow-flowing to moderately flowing rivers and floodplain channels, often stained by dissolved tannins from surrounding vegetation or turbid with suspended sediment, where visibility is poor for much of the year. That dim-water setting is the evolutionary backdrop for the family's electric sense — electrolocation lets mormyrids navigate structure and find prey in conditions where eyesight alone would be unreliable.
Feeding
Specific dietary studies of Campylomormyrus tshokwe have not been done, but its foraging biology can be inferred with reasonable confidence from its close relatives and its own anatomy. Like other Campylomormyrus, it almost certainly forages by probing its curved, electroreceptor-packed snout into sediment, leaf litter and crevices to detect and extract small aquatic invertebrates — insect larvae, worms and similar prey — that would otherwise be hidden from sight. Research on other Campylomormyrus species has linked snout shape and length to differences in foraging depth and diet between congeners sharing the same river system, a plausible pattern for this species too, though it has not been directly confirmed for C. tshokwe.
In captivity, general mormyrid husbandry calls for live and frozen invertebrate foods — bloodworm, brine shrimp, blackworm and similar — offered at or near the substrate. Mormyrids are shy, largely crepuscular-to-nocturnal feeders that can struggle to compete with bold, fast-moving tankmates at a communal feeding, so target feeding after the lights dim is generally recommended for the family.
Mating
Mormyrid courtship is built around the electric organ discharge: EOD waveform and pulse rate are thought to help fish recognise their own species and assess potential mates, and many mormyrids modulate their discharge rate during social and courtship encounters. Beyond that general pattern, the courtship behaviour of Campylomormyrus tshokwe specifically has not been documented — this is a poorly studied genus in the wild, and detailed field observations of spawning behaviour are sparse even for better-known Campylomormyrus species.
What is known across mormyrids generally is that spawning is seasonal and tied to the flood cycle: rising water during the rainy season appears to trigger reproductive activity in many species, presumably because floodplain vegetation and rising river levels open up new spawning and nursery habitat. Whether C. tshokwe follows this same flood-triggered pattern in the Kasai drainage has not been specifically confirmed, but it is the reasonable, well-supported assumption for the family.
Breeding
Campylomormyrus tshokwe has essentially never been bred in the aquarium, and this is true of the great majority of mormyrids — captive breeding in this family is rare and its biology remains poorly understood even for well-established aquarium species like Gnathonemus petersii. Virtually every mormyrid offered in the trade, including this species where it appears at all, is wild-caught rather than captive-bred.
In the wild, some mormyrids are thought to scatter eggs among submerged vegetation or debris during flood-season spawning, with little to no parental care afterward, but the details for Campylomormyrus tshokwe specifically are not documented. Prospective breeders should treat any attempt as genuinely experimental, with no established protocol to follow.
In the aquarium
Campylomormyrus tshokwe is a specialist fish for an experienced keeper, not a beginner community species, and stock availability is limited given its narrow native range. Provide soft, slightly acidic to near-neutral water — general mormyrid guidance points to roughly pH 6–7.5 — kept warm and, critically, stable: mormyrids are notably sensitive to fluctuating water chemistry and to poor water quality generally, and they do best in a mature, well-filtered, low-light tank with a sandy substrate they can probe without damaging the sensitive snout.
As in other mormyrids, medication needs care: this is a scaleless fish, more sensitive than scaled species to copper-based treatments and to some other medications, so dose conservatively and treat only when necessary. Mormyrids can also be territorial or outright aggressive toward their own species in a confined tank, so stocking is a balancing act — a lone individual, or a genuinely spacious setup with visual breaks if keeping more than one, tends to work better than a small group crowded together. Species-specific captive-care notes for C. tshokwe are sparse; the guidance above is extrapolated from the wider Mormyridae and should be treated as a starting point rather than a settled formula.
Conservation
The IUCN Red List assesses Campylomormyrus tshokwe as Least Concern, an assessment made on 16 February 2009. No significant current threats to the species are documented, and its Congo basin range — the Kwango and Luachimo rivers within the Kasai drainage — is reported as largely intact.
That said, this is a narrow-range endemic restricted to a specific pair of river systems rather than a widely distributed species, so its long-term security still depends on the health of those particular waters. Broader Congo basin pressures — deforestation, mining, and any future hydropower or agricultural development along the Kasai drainage — are the kind of changes that could eventually affect a fish with this restricted a range, even though no such impact has been documented for C. tshokwe specifically.