Tropheops macrophthalmus "Lumbila"
Lumbila — loom-BEE-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 Tropheops macrophthalmus account →Specific to Lumbila
- 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 Tropheops macrophthalmus.
The Lumbila population
Tropheops macrophthalmus "Lumbila" is the Lumbila population of Tropheops macrophthalmus, a geographic colour form from the Tanzania coast of Lake Malawi in the far northern part of the lake. It is the same species as Tropheops macrophthalmus, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Lumbila fish at malawi.si →
About the species
Tropheops macrophthalmus is a small, rock-grazing cichlid found only in the northern reaches of Lake Malawi, one of the lake's enormous flock of mbuna. First described as a Pseudotropheus in 1926, it spent most of a century shuffling between genera before settling into Tropheops, the lineage of blunt-headed algae specialists. Like its relatives it is a maternal mouthbrooder, and across its range it splinters into a string of geographic colour forms tied to individual reefs and islands.
Full Tropheops macrophthalmus account →Sources
- malawi.si — Tropheops macrophthalmus "Lumbila"
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Tropheops macrophthalmus (species record)
- FishBase — Tropheops macrophthalmus (Ahl, 1926)
- Genner, Turner & Hawkins (1999), Resource control by territorial male cichlid fish in Lake Malawi (J. Animal Ecology 68:522–529) — abstract
- Genner et al. 1999 — Resource control by territorial male cichlid fish in Lake Malawi (full article)
- Li et al. 2016, Zootaxa — phylogeny supporting Tropheops as a genus (PDF)