Melanochromis chipokae "Chidunga Rocks"
Chidunga Rocks — chee-DOON-gah ROKS (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 Melanochromis chipokae account →Specific to Chidunga Rocks
- 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 Melanochromis chipokae.
The Chidunga Rocks population
Melanochromis chipokae "Chidunga Rocks" is the Chidunga Rocks population of Melanochromis chipokae, a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the southern part of the lake. It is the same species as Melanochromis chipokae, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Chidunga Rocks fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Melanochromis chipokae is a slender, predatory mbuna endemic to a single small rocky reef in the southwestern arm of Lake Malawi. It is a textbook case of sexual dichromatism — adult males are dark blue-black laced with electric-blue stripes, while females and juveniles wear lemon-yellow flanks crossed by bold black bands — and a textbook case of mbuna belligerence, with a hobby reputation as one of the most relentlessly aggressive cichlids in the lake. Once a fixture of the aquarium trade, it has been collected so heavily at its tiny home reef that the IUCN now lists it as Critically Endangered, a rare example of an ornamental fish driven toward extinction in the wild by the hobby that loves it.
Full Melanochromis chipokae account →Sources
- malawi.si — Melanochromis chipokae "Chidunga Rocks"
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Melanochromis chipokae (species record; valid name, type locality, holotype USNM 214173)
- FishBase — Melanochromis chipokae (Johnson, 1975)
- GBIF — Melanochromis chipokae Johnson, 1975 (Backbone Taxonomy)
- Konings, A. F. & Stauffer, J. R. (2012) — 'Review of the Lake Malaŵi genus Melanochromis with a description of a new species', Zootaxa 3258: 1–27 (redescription of M. chipokae)
- Johnson, D. S. (1975) — 'More new Malawi cichlids', Today's Aquarist 2(1): 15–26 (original description)