Perissodus microlepis "Mawimbi"
Mawimbi — mah-WEEM-bee (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 Perissodus microlepis account →Specific to Mawimbi
- 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 Perissodus microlepis.
The Mawimbi population
Perissodus microlepis "Mawimbi" is the Mawimbi population of Perissodus microlepis, a geographic colour form from the Tanzania coast of Lake Tanganyika in the northern part of the lake. It is the same species as Perissodus microlepis, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Mawimbi fish at tanganyika.si →
About the species
Perissodus microlepis is a small cichlid from Lake Tanganyika that earns a living the way almost nothing else in fresh water does: it sneaks up behind larger fish and tears scales off their living flanks. Stranger still, the population comes in left- and right-mouthed forms, each twisted to bite one side of its prey — and a famous 1993 field study argued that whichever form is rarer enjoys a hunting advantage, keeping the two near a 50:50 split through frequency-dependent selection. That tidy 'textbook' story has since been complicated by work suggesting the asymmetry is more of a continuum than two clean morphs, which is part of what makes this unassuming fish one of the most argued-over animals in evolutionary biology.
Full Perissodus microlepis account →Sources
- tanganyika.si — Perissodus microlepis "Mawimbi"
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Perissodus microlepis (species record, Boulenger 1898; holotype, synonymy)
- FishBase — Perissodus microlepis (size, ecology, trophic level, distribution, etymology)
- GBIF — Perissodus microlepis Boulenger, 1898 (taxonomy & occurrences)
- Hori, M. (1993), 'Frequency-Dependent Natural Selection in the Handedness of Scale-Eating Cichlid Fish', Science 260:216-219
- Hori (1993) abstract & metadata — PubMed