Telmatochromis vittatus "Kerege Island"
Kerege Island — keh-REH-geh 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 Telmatochromis vittatus account →Specific to Kerege 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 Telmatochromis vittatus.
The Kerege Island population
Telmatochromis vittatus "Kerege Island" is the Kerege Island population of Telmatochromis vittatus, a geographic colour form from Lake Tanganyika in Lake Tanganyika 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 Kerege Island 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 "Kerege Island"
- 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)