Petrotilapia sp. "Fuscous" "Maleri Island"
Maleri Island — mah-LEH-ree 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 Petrotilapia sp. "Fuscous" account →Specific to Maleri 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 Petrotilapia sp. "Fuscous".
The Maleri Island population
Petrotilapia sp. "Fuscous" "Maleri Island" is the Maleri Island population of Petrotilapia sp. "Fuscous", a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the southern part of the lake. It is the same species as Petrotilapia sp. "Fuscous", distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Maleri Island fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Petrotilapia sp. "Fuscous" is an undescribed rock-scraping mbuna from the mid-western shore of Lake Malawi, recorded from the Maleri Islands group and nearby island reefs. Petrotilapia is the lake’s genus of dedicated algae scrapers — deep-bodied, heavily muscled fish with several rows of hooked, recurved teeth built to strip tough algal turf from wave-battered vertical rock. The genus is notoriously under-described: extreme sexual dichromatism and strong locality-based colour variation mean many populations are known only by trade names, of which this is one. "Fuscous" — Latin for dusky or dark brown — points to its colouration. It has no describing author, FishBase entry, or IUCN status.
Full Petrotilapia sp. "Fuscous" account →