Astatotilapia calliptera "Thumbi East Island"
Thumbi East Island — TOOM-bee EEST EYE-land (approx.)
The fish
How this cichlid is built, and everything about how it lives, eats and breeds, is shared with the species — this page doesn't repeat it.
Read the full Astatotilapia calliptera account →Specific to Thumbi East Island
- Collection locality & coordinates
- Local coloration — best judged from the living-fish photo
- Kept as a single-provenance line, never crossed with other collection points
Care facts below are the species' — shared with Astatotilapia calliptera.
The Thumbi East Island population
Astatotilapia calliptera "Thumbi East Island" is the Thumbi East Island population of Astatotilapia calliptera, a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the southern part of the lake. It is the same species as Astatotilapia calliptera, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Thumbi East Island fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Astatotilapia calliptera, the "eastern happy," is a small, hardy haplochromine that lives along the weedy, vegetated margins of Lake Malawi and ranges far beyond it — into the lake's inflowing rivers and swamps, the satellite Lakes Chilwa and Chiuta, and the coastal rivers of Mozambique from the Rovuma south to the Save. It is one of the very few cichlids of the Malawi basin that is not a lake endemic, and that is precisely why ichthyologists care about it: genome studies repeatedly recover Astatotilapia calliptera as a generalist lineage sitting close to the riverine ancestor from which Lake Malawi's 700-plus endemic species erupted. In the tank it reads as an unassuming greenish-gold mouthbrooder; in the evolutionary literature it is something closer to a living model of how a single adaptable generalist became a flock.
Full Astatotilapia calliptera account →Sources
- malawi.si — Astatotilapia calliptera "Thumbi East Island"
- FishBase — Astatotilapia calliptera (Eastern happy)
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Astatotilapia calliptera (species record)
- GBIF — Astatotilapia calliptera (Günther, 1894)
- USGS Nonindigenous Aquatic Species — Astatotilapia calliptera factsheet (native range incl. Zambia)
- USFWS Ecological Risk Screening Summary — Eastern Happy