Ctenopharynx pictus "Liwani"
Ctenopharynx pictus (Likoma Island, Liwani)
Liwani — lee-WAH-nee (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 Liwani
- 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 Liwani population
Ctenopharynx pictus "Liwani" is the Liwani population of Ctenopharynx pictus, 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 Ctenopharynx pictus, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Liwani 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 "Liwani"
- 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)
- IUCN Red List — Ctenopharynx pictus "Liwani"