Mchenga thinos "Mdowa"
Mdowa — m-DOH-wah (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 Mchenga thinos account →Specific to Mdowa
- 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 Mchenga thinos.
The Mdowa population
Mchenga thinos "Mdowa" is the Mdowa population of Mchenga thinos, 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 Mchenga thinos, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Mdowa fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Mchenga thinos is a small, silvery, plankton-eating cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi, one of the open-water "utaka" haplochromines that drift in shoals over the lake's sand and rubble flats. Like its relatives, the male is an architect: at the boundary where rock gives way to sand, 15 to 25 m down, he piles sand into a neat cone-shaped "bower" and courts passing females from its summit. Described in 1993 as a Copadichromis and reassigned in 2006 to the then-new genus Mchenga, it is a quiet, lake-wide species that most aquarists have never knowingly kept.
Full Mchenga thinos account →Sources
- malawi.si — Mchenga thinos "Mdowa"
- Mchenga thinos — FishBase species summary
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes (genus Mchenga, species thinos)
- Stauffer, LoVullo & McKaye (1993), Three new sand-dwelling cichlids from Lake Malawi (Copeia, original description)
- Stauffer & Konings (2006), Review of Copadichromis with the description of a new genus and six new species (FishBase reference)
- Stauffer & Konings (2006), Review of Copadichromis... new genus (ResearchGate record)