Cynotilapia sp. "Chilumba Deep" "Chilumba"
Cynotilapia sp. "Chilumba Deep" (Chilumba)
Chilumba — chee-LOOM-bah (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 Cynotilapia sp. "Chilumba Deep" account →Specific to Chilumba
- 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 Cynotilapia sp. "Chilumba Deep".
The Chilumba population
Cynotilapia sp. "Chilumba Deep" "Chilumba" is the Chilumba population of Cynotilapia sp. "Chilumba Deep", a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the far northern part of the lake. It is the same species as Cynotilapia sp. "Chilumba Deep", distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Chilumba fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Cynotilapia sp. "Chilumba Deep" is an undescribed mbuna documented from deeper water off Chilumba, on Lake Malawi's northern Malawian shore — the same general locality that hosts a far better known shallow-water Cynotilapia population, treated in this atlas as Cynotilapia aurifrons "Chilumba". The trade name records a depth split rather than a difference in geography: shallow- and deep-water populations of the same reef sometimes diverge in colour and, in a few studied cases elsewhere in the lake, turn out to be genetically distinct lineages rather than one species occupying two depths. Whether that holds here has not been established.
Full Cynotilapia sp. "Chilumba Deep" account →