Aulonocara stuartgranti "Masinje"
Masinje — mah-SEEN-jeh (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 Aulonocara stuartgranti account →Specific to Masinje
- 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 Aulonocara stuartgranti.
The Masinje population
Aulonocara stuartgranti "Masinje" is the Masinje population of Aulonocara stuartgranti, a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the south-central part of the lake. It is the same species as Aulonocara stuartgranti, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Masinje fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Aulonocara stuartgranti, known in the hobby as Grant's peacock, is a maternal mouthbrooding cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi and one of the most familiar faces in the African-cichlid hobby. It is the archetypal "peacock": a sand-and-rock fish that hovers a few millimeters above the bottom and detects buried invertebrates with the enlarged lateral-line canals pitting its lower jaw — a sixth-sense feeding system confirmed in the lab on this very species. Across the lake it splits into dozens of vividly distinct geographic colour forms, from the orange-tailed Ngara "flametail" to the blue Usisya and Cobue, which is exactly why it is both beloved and a perennial hybridization headache for keepers.
Full Aulonocara stuartgranti account →Sources
- malawi.si — Aulonocara stuartgranti "Masinje"
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Aulonocara stuartgranti (species record)
- FishBase — Aulonocara stuartgranti (Meyer & Riehl, 1985) summary
- GBIF — Aulonocara stuartgranti occurrence records
- malawi.si (Stuart M. Grant / M.K. Oliver, The Cichlid Fishes of Lake Malaŵi) — Aulonocara and its location variants
- Ad Konings — Malawi Cichlids in their Natural Habitat (Cichlid Press; foremost authority on Lake Malawi Aulonocara and their geographic colour forms)