Maylandia pulpican "Lumbaulo"
Lumbaulo — loom-bah-OO-loh (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 Maylandia pulpican account →Specific to Lumbaulo
- 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 Maylandia pulpican.
The Lumbaulo population
Maylandia pulpican "Lumbaulo" is the Lumbaulo population of Maylandia pulpican, a geographic colour form from the Mozambique coast of Lake Malawi in the central part of the lake. It is the same species as Maylandia pulpican, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Lumbaulo fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Maylandia pulpican is a small, sharply patterned mbuna from the islands and Mozambican shores of southern Lake Malawi. Males wear a base coat of steel-blue to near-black, broken by bold vertical bars, and defend territories with a combativeness that the describer memorialized in the fish's name — pulpican is a Breton word for the goblin-dwarves of Armorican folklore, creatures famous for harassing anything that crosses their path. Like the best of the mbunas, it rewards a well-set-up aquarium with constant activity and, for a keeper who pays attention to stocking, straightforward breeding.
Full Maylandia pulpican account →Sources
- malawi.si — Maylandia pulpican "Lumbaulo"
- FishBase — Maylandia pulpican summary page
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — pulpican, Cynotilapia (species record, updated May 2026)
- GBIF — Maylandia pulpican (Tawil, 2002), taxon key 11031359
- The ETYFish Project — Family Cichlidae part 4 (Pseudocrenilabrinae: Labeotropheus–Otopharynx)
- Tawil, P. 2002 — Description de Cynotilapia pulpican n. sp. (abstract via malawicichlids.com)