Mylochromis anaphyrmus "Malopa"
Mylochromis anaphyrmus (Chitseko Reef, Malopa, Otter Island, Thumbi West Island)
Malopa — mah-LOH-pah (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 Mylochromis anaphyrmus account →Specific to Malopa
- 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 Mylochromis anaphyrmus.
The Malopa population
Mylochromis anaphyrmus "Malopa" is the Malopa population of Mylochromis anaphyrmus, a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the south-central part of the lake. It is the same species as Mylochromis anaphyrmus, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Malopa fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Mylochromis anaphyrmus is a sand-dwelling haplochromine cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi, built around one of the most specialised diets in the lake's species flock: it excavates snails from silty sand with a set of flattened, molariform pharyngeal teeth that function like a pair of nutcrackers. Reaching around 9 in in males, it is a stocky, subdued fish of the deeper sandy intermediate zone — barely traded, rarely seen in aquaria, but a key invertivore in the lake's benthic food web. The genus name it now carries, Mylochromis, was itself once disputed; the fish spent decades filed under the synonym Maravichromis before that name was formally sunk.
Full Mylochromis anaphyrmus account →Sources
- malawi.si — Mylochromis anaphyrmus "Malopa"
- FishBase — Mylochromis anaphyrmus (Burgess & Axelrod, 1973)
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Mylochromis anaphyrmus (species record; holotype USNM 210699)
- GBIF — Mylochromis anaphyrmus (Burgess & Axelrod, 1973); taxon key 2372244
- Burgess, W.E. & Axelrod, H.R. (1973) — New cichlids from Lake Malawi. Tropical Fish Hobbyist 22(2): 87–98 [original description]
- Derijst, E. & Snoeks, J. (1992) — Maravichromis Eccles & Trewavas, 1989, a junior synonym of Mylochromis Regan, 1920 (Teleostei, Cichlidae). Cybium 16(2):173
- IUCN Red List — Mylochromis anaphyrmus "Malopa"