This issue of Cichlid News has something for every cichlidophile. Paul V. Loiselle treats us to a review of the aquarium husbandry of the four species of the West African genus Pelmatochromis after reviewing the sometimes muddled taxonomic history of these uncommon cichlids. I, for one, am thankful for the beautiful photographic images of these fish, many of which I had never seen before owing to their scarcity in the aquarium hobby until relatively recently. Ad Konings writes about the cow-eyed featherfin from Lake Tanganyika, Ophthalmotilapia boops. I was fascinated in particular, by their breeding behavior which, like other Ophthalmotilapia species involves the yellow lappets at the ends of the male’s ventral fins. These resemble eggs, and function as egg-dummies in order to ensure fertilization of the real eggs inside the female’s mouth. Fascinating! And beautiful.
Speaking of beautiful…regular contributor Patrick Tawil introduces us to a beautiful but uncommon dwarf mbuna, Pseudotropheus sp. ‘elongatus ruarwe’, an as yet undescribed species. As the name indicates, the geographical origin of this cichlid is Ruarwe on the northwestern coast of Lake Malawi. Interestingly, there are no color differences between the sexes: both sport electric blue and dark blue vertical bars which have very few equivalents among mbuna. Patrick discusses the husbandry of this stunner in the home aquarium.
For New World cichlidophiles we have two articles concerning taxonomic changes in both Central and South American cichlids. Frequent contributor on matters Heroini, Willem Heijns shares his understanding of the very recently published phylogenetic study based on DNA sequencing about the relatedness of the heroine cichlids with the creation of several new genera (McMahan et al. 2015). We may have to learn some new names.
As was the case for another South American cichlid introduced first in the pages of Cichlid News by Oliver Lucanus (eg. Geophagus mirabilis), a Retroculus species he shared with us in 2011 has now been formally described as Retroculus acherontos (Landim et al. 2015). We present glorious photos of all four of the currently recognized species.
We end, as usual, with Laif DeMason’s regular feature ‘What’s New’. As the weather turns chilly, please enjoy your cichlids!
