Mylochromis plagiotaenia "Otter Island"
Mylochromis plagiotaenia (Mdoka, Mvunguti, Otter Island)
Otter Island — OT-ter EYE-land (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 plagiotaenia account →Specific to Otter Island
- 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 plagiotaenia.
The Otter Island population
Mylochromis plagiotaenia "Otter Island" is the Otter Island population of Mylochromis plagiotaenia, a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the southern part of the lake. It is the same species as Mylochromis plagiotaenia, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Otter Island fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Mylochromis plagiotaenia is a sand- and mixed-habitat haplochromine cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi, one of the many species in the large genus Mylochromis distinguished from one another chiefly by subtle marking and dental differences. Its epithet, Greek for oblique-banded, describes a diagonal stripe running down and back across the flank — a marking pattern echoed in a handful of other large Malawi predators and haplochromines, including the fin-biting Docimodus. Documented from the far north of the lake down to the central shoreline, it is a widely distributed but seldom-kept fish known mainly through field and collection-locality records.
Full Mylochromis plagiotaenia account →