Champsochromis spilorhynchus "Mazinzi Reef"
Mazinzi Reef — mah-ZEEN-zee REEF (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 Champsochromis spilorhynchus account →Specific to Mazinzi Reef
- 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 Champsochromis spilorhynchus.
The Mazinzi Reef population
Champsochromis spilorhynchus "Mazinzi Reef" is the Mazinzi Reef population of Champsochromis spilorhynchus, a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the southern part of the lake. It is the same species as Champsochromis spilorhynchus, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Mazinzi Reef fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Champsochromis spilorhynchus is a large, open-water pursuit predator endemic to Lake Malawi, built along the same fusiform lines as its better-known congener the "Malawi trout" but wearing a signature: a bold black blotch on the preorbital bone that gives it both its scientific name and an unmistakable face. Once common lake-wide, decades of shallow-water beach-seine fishing have reduced it to near-invisibility — the IUCN assessed it as Endangered in 2018, estimating a population collapse exceeding 90 percent since the early 1980s, and it is one of the few Malawi cichlids whose scarcity is genuinely alarming rather than rhetorical.
Full Champsochromis spilorhynchus account →Sources
- malawi.si — Champsochromis spilorhynchus "Mazinzi Reef"
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Champsochromis spilorhynchus (Regan 1922); lectotype BMNH 1921.9.6.181; synonym H. longipes
- FishBase — Champsochromis spilorhynchus summary (size, depth, IUCN, life cycle)
- GBIF — Champsochromis spilorhynchus (Regan, 1922); backbone taxonomy and type specimen records
- The ETYFish Project — Cichlidae: Pseudocrenilabrinae (Champsochromis; spilorhynchus etymology: spilos + rhynchos)
- Regan, C. T. 1922 — 'The Cichlid Fishes of Lake Nyassa', Proc. Zool. Soc. London 1921(pt 4):675–727 (original description of H. spilorhynchus and H. longipes)