Aquarist Atlas
↑ Collection form of Copadichromis mbenjii

Copadichromis mbenjii "Mbenji Island"

Mbenji Island — m-BEHN-jee 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 Copadichromis mbenjii account →

Specific to Mbenji 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 Copadichromis mbenjii.

IUCNLEAST CONCERN · 2018
CARESNOT LISTED
Scientific size5.5 in14 cm total length
Temperature75–81 °F24–27 °C
pH7.3–8.4alkaline
Depth23–62 ft7–19 m
DietZooplanktivore (utaka), also benthic invertebrates
BreedingMaternal mouthbrooder; male builds a sand bower~20–40 fry per brood (malawi.si)
Sexual dimorphismYesFemales/juveniles plain silvery with three black spots; breeding males blue-headed with yellow breast and yellow anal- and dorsal-fin margins.
PhotographsSee photosGoogle Images →

The Mbenji Island population

Copadichromis mbenjii "Mbenji Island" is the Mbenji Island population of Copadichromis mbenjii, 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 Copadichromis mbenjii, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.

Colour reference: living Mbenji Island fish at malawi.si →

About the species

Copadichromis mbenjii is a zooplankton-feeding haplochromine cichlid endemic to a single place on Earth: Mbenji Island, a small rocky outcrop in the southern half of Lake Malawi. It belongs to the lake's "utaka" guild — the open-water and reef-edge plankton pickers that hover in shoals and snap drifting copepods out of the current — but unlike the truly pelagic utaka it stays close to the sand-and-rock interface, which has spared it the worst of the lake's seine-net fisheries. Sold in the hobby as the "Quads," it pairs a blue-headed, yellow-breasted breeding male with a strictly local distribution that makes it both a collector's favorite and a textbook case of Lake Malawi micro-endemism.

Full Copadichromis mbenjii account →

Sources

  1. malawi.si — Copadichromis mbenjii "Mbenji Island"
  2. Catalog of Fishes (Eschmeyer) — Copadichromis mbenjii (species record, authority & types)
  3. FishBase — Copadichromis mbenjii summary
  4. malawi.si — Copadichromis mbenjii 'Mbenji Island' (Gregor Bauer / M.K. Oliver database; photos © Ad Konings)
  5. Konings, A. 1990. Descriptions of six new Malawi cichlids. Tropical Fish Hobbyist 38(11): 110–129 (original description)
  6. Maréchal, C. 1991. Copadichromis. pp. 51–58 in Check-list of the freshwater fishes of Africa (CLOFFA) vol. 4