Variabilichromis moorii "Kapere"
Kapere — kah-PEH-reh (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 Variabilichromis moorii account →Specific to Kapere
- 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 Variabilichromis moorii.
The Kapere population
Variabilichromis moorii "Kapere" is the Kapere population of Variabilichromis moorii, a geographic colour form from the Tanzania coast of Lake Tanganyika in the southern part of the lake. It is the same species as Variabilichromis moorii, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Kapere fish at tanganyika.si →
About the species
Variabilichromis moorii is a small, dark, fiercely territorial cichlid found only in the southern half of Lake Tanganyika, where it tends algae-covered rock faces in the sunlit shallows. It is one of the few members of the substrate-spawning tribe Lamprologini to make a living grazing filamentous algae, and it pairs for life — yet genetic studies reveal that the brood a male defends so violently is, on average, only about two-thirds his own. The dramatic switch from canary-yellow juveniles to coal-black adults gives the genus its name, "the variable cichlid."
Full Variabilichromis moorii account →Sources
- tanganyika.si — Variabilichromis moorii "Kapere"
- FishBase — Variabilichromis moorii
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes (Fricke, Eschmeyer & Van der Laan)
- Hata et al. 2014 — Diet disparity among sympatric herbivorous cichlids in the same ecomorphs (BMC Biology)
- Takeuchi et al. 2016 — Depth and substratum differentiations among coexisting herbivorous cichlids (Royal Society Open Science)
- Depth segregation and diet disparity revealed by stable isotope analysis (PMC4657292)