Ctenopharynx pictus "Likoma Island"
Likoma Island — lee-KOH-mah 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 Ctenopharynx pictus account →Specific to Likoma 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 Ctenopharynx pictus.
The Likoma Island population
Ctenopharynx pictus "Likoma Island" is the Likoma Island population of Ctenopharynx pictus, a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the central part of the lake. It is the same species as Ctenopharynx pictus, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Likoma Island fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Ctenopharynx pictus is a modestly sized, sediment-sifting cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi, the kind of fish that rarely makes a poster but quietly defines how the lake's intermediate zone works. It earns its genus name — Greek for "comb-throat" — from an unusually dense rake of gill filaments that it uses to strain tiny crustaceans out of mouthfuls of fine sediment. Males flush a pale nuptial blue only in the breeding season and build sand bowers on rock, and brooding females have a habit, documented in the wild, of parking their fry near the nest of a large predatory catfish.
Full Ctenopharynx pictus account →Sources
- malawi.si — Ctenopharynx pictus "Likoma Island"
- Catalog of Fishes (Eschmeyer) — Haplochromis pictus / Ctenopharynx pictus
- FishBase — Ctenopharynx pictus summary
- FishBase — Ctenopharynx pictus ecology summary
- ITIS — Ctenopharynx pictus (TSN 649081)
- FishBase — Ctenopharynx nitidus (congener for comparison)