Grammatotria lemairii "Kigoma"
Grammatotria lemairii (Cape Nangu, Katete, Kigoma, Lyamembe, Maswa, Segunga)
Kigoma — kee-GOH-mah (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 Grammatotria lemairii account →Specific to Kigoma
- 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 Grammatotria lemairii.
The Kigoma population
Grammatotria lemairii "Kigoma" is the Kigoma population of Grammatotria lemairii, a geographic colour form from the Tanzania coast of Lake Tanganyika in the northern part of the lake. It is the same species as Grammatotria lemairii, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Kigoma fish at tanganyika.si →
About the species
Grammatotria lemairii, known to fishers on the Tanzanian shore as the nungi, is the largest of Lake Tanganyika's sand-sifting cichlids and the only member of its genus. A silvery, torpedo-shaped fish with a sharply pointed snout, it makes a living the way a few hundred smaller relatives do — by taking mouthfuls of the lakebed, sorting the edible from the inert, and spitting the sand back out — but it does so at a scale none of them can match, driving its snout deeper into the substrate to reach prey the little sifters never touch. Outside the breeding season it gathers into roaming schools over open sand, an unhurried giant in a habitat usually dominated by far smaller cichlids.
Full Grammatotria lemairii account →Sources
- tanganyika.si — Grammatotria lemairii "Kigoma"
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Grammatotria lemairii (Boulenger, 1899)
- FishBase — Grammatotria lemairii (Boulenger, 1899)
- IRMNG — Grammatotria Boulenger, 1899
- O'Reilly et al. 2003, Climate change decreases aquatic ecosystem productivity of Lake Tanganyika (Nature)
- Cohen et al. 2016, Climate warming reduces fish production and benthic habitat in Lake Tanganyika (PNAS)
- IUCN Red List — Grammatotria lemairii "Kigoma"