Telmatochromis vittatus "Isanga Bay"
Isanga Bay — ee-SAHN-gah 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 Telmatochromis vittatus account →Specific to Isanga 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 Telmatochromis vittatus.
The Isanga Bay population
Telmatochromis vittatus "Isanga Bay" is the Isanga Bay population of Telmatochromis vittatus, a geographic colour form from the Zambia coast of Lake Tanganyika in the southern part of the lake. It is the same species as Telmatochromis vittatus, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Isanga Bay fish at tanganyika.si →
About the species
Telmatochromis vittatus is a small, torpedo-shaped lamprologine cichlid endemic to Lake Tanganyika, where it grazes aufwuchs from rocky shores and tucks itself into crevices and empty snail shells. It is one of a cluster of look-alike striped Telmatochromis that hobbyists and even reference books routinely confuse. Its most curious wrinkle is ecological rather than visual: across the lake the species appears in a normal rock-dwelling form and a markedly smaller form that lives among shell beds, a split that mirrors a wider pattern of body-size divergence in the genus.
Full Telmatochromis vittatus account →Sources
- tanganyika.si — Telmatochromis vittatus "Isanga Bay"
- FishBase: Telmatochromis vittatus (Boulenger, 1898)
- Catalog of Fishes (Cichlidae family details, listing T. vittatus as accepted/original)
- Morphological diversity of the genus Telmatochromis from Lake Tanganyika (recognizing the 'T. vittatus complex')
- Takahashi et al. (2009) — Evidence for divergent natural selection in body size of a Lake Tanganyika cichlid (T. temporalis), Molecular Ecology
- The taxonomic diversity of the cichlid fish fauna of ancient Lake Tanganyika (type locality: Mbity Rocks)