Interochromis loocki "Mboko Island"
Mboko Island — m-BOH-koh 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 Interochromis loocki account →Specific to Mboko 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 Interochromis loocki.
The Mboko Island population
Interochromis loocki "Mboko Island" is the Mboko Island population of Interochromis loocki, a geographic colour form from the Democratic Republic of the Congo coast of Lake Tanganyika in the north-central part of the lake. It is the same species as Interochromis loocki, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Mboko Island fish at tanganyika.si →
About the species
Interochromis loocki is a stocky, rock-grazing cichlid endemic to Lake Tanganyika and the sole member of its genus. To hobbyists it is best known under the old trade label "a Petrochromis-like fish (sold under various 'Petrochromis sp.' trade names)," and that nickname turns out to be more than a marketing convenience: anatomy, gut structure, and recent genome-scale phylogenies all place this fish squarely among the aufwuchs-scraping Petrochromis, even though it carries its own generic name. It is a small fish with a big appetite for algae and a temper to match, occupying a defined depth band on the lake's rocky littoral slopes.
Full Interochromis loocki account →Sources
- tanganyika.si — Interochromis loocki "Mboko Island"
- Interochromis loocki — FishBase summary
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Limnotilapia loocki / Interochromis loocki
- Yamaoka, Hori & Kuwamura (1998), Interochromis, a new genus of the Tanganyikan cichlid fish (abstract, CRC)
- Hata & Ochi (2016), Depth and substratum differentiations among coexisting herbivorous cichlids in Lake Tanganyika, R. Soc. Open Sci.
- Phylogenomics of trophically diverse cichlids (Singh et al. 2022), Ecol. Evol. — loocki in Petrochromis Clade II