Lethrinops macrochir "Senga Bay"
Senga Bay — SEHN-gah BAY (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 Lethrinops macrochir account →Specific to Senga Bay
- 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 Lethrinops macrochir.
The Senga Bay population
Lethrinops macrochir "Senga Bay" is the Senga Bay population of Lethrinops macrochir, a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the southern part of the lake. It is the same species as Lethrinops macrochir, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Senga Bay fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Lethrinops macrochir is a sand-dwelling haplochromine cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi, part of the large genus Charles Tate Regan carved out of the lake's cichlid fauna in his 1922 monograph The Cichlid Fishes of Lake Nyassa. Like its many relatives it works open sandy shelves for buried invertebrates, dropping protrusible jaws into the substrate and sifting mouthfuls of sand for prey too small and well hidden for a rock-grazing mbuna to find. Its epithet, from the Greek for large hand, most likely points to a conspicuously enlarged fin — probably the pectoral — a detail early taxonomists often reached for when distinguishing similar-looking sand cichlids from one another.
Full Lethrinops macrochir account →