Protomelas fenestratus "Chitimba Bay"
Chitimba Bay — chee-TEEM-bah BAY (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 Protomelas fenestratus account →Specific to Chitimba Bay
- 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 Protomelas fenestratus.
The Chitimba Bay population
Protomelas fenestratus "Chitimba Bay" is the Chitimba Bay population of Protomelas fenestratus, a geographic colour form from the Malawi coast of Lake Malawi in the northern part of the lake. It is the same species as Protomelas fenestratus, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Chitimba Bay fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Protomelas fenestratus is a haplochromine cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi, one of roughly fifteen species in a genus found nowhere else on Earth. It makes its living at the seam where the lake's rocky reefs give way to open sand, blowing mouthfuls of loose sediment off the rocks to expose the small invertebrates hiding beneath. Boldly barred and only moderately sized, it has spent decades in the aquarium trade under a tangle of names — "Haplochromis Steveni Thick Bars" among them — that have caused as much confusion as the fish itself is striking.
Full Protomelas fenestratus account →Sources
- malawi.si — Protomelas fenestratus "Chitimba Bay"
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Protomelas fenestratus (Trewavas, 1935)
- FishBase — Protomelas fenestratus (Fenestratus)
- GBIF — Protomelas fenestratus (Trewavas, 1935)
- Pereyra, Taylor, Turner & Rico (2004), Variation in habitat preference and population structure among three species of the Lake Malawi cichlid genus Protomelas, Molecular Ecology 13:2691–2697
- Trewavas (1935), A Synopsis of the Cichlid Fishes of Lake Nyasa, Annals and Magazine of Natural History (10)16:65–118 (via Cichlid Room Companion reference archive)