Simochromis diagramma "Kala"
Kala — KAH-lah (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 Simochromis diagramma account →Specific to Kala
- 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 Simochromis diagramma.
The Kala population
Simochromis diagramma "Kala" is the Kala population of Simochromis diagramma, a geographic colour form from the Tanzania coast of Lake Tanganyika in the central part of the lake. It is the same species as Simochromis diagramma, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Kala fish at tanganyika.si →
About the species
Simochromis diagramma is a stocky, banded algae-grazing cichlid endemic to Lake Tanganyika, and the largest member of its genus at around 8 inches (20 cm). It is a fish of the lake's sunlit shallows, hugging rubble and rock in the top few meters of water where filamentous algae grow thickest, and it earns its keep the way Tropheus does: scraping a living off the stones, then guarding its territory with the kind of bad temper that makes it a handful in captivity. A maternal mouthbrooder with a wide lake-wide range, it is one of the more abundant and resilient of Tanganyika's rock-dwelling herbivores, but its livelihood is tied to a shallow benthic zone that the lake's warming is steadily eroding.
Full Simochromis diagramma account →Sources
- tanganyika.si — Simochromis diagramma "Kala"
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Simochromis diagramma (Günther, 1894)
- FishBase — Simochromis diagramma (Günther, 1894)
- GBIF — Simochromis diagramma (Günther, 1894)
- Hata et al. (2015), Sci. Rep./BMC — Depth segregation and diet disparity revealed by stable isotope analyses in sympatric herbivorous cichlids in Lake Tanganyika
- Hata et al. (2014), BMC Biology — Diet disparity among sympatric herbivorous cichlids in the same ecomorphs in Lake Tanganyika