Satoh et al. identify an evolutionary correlation between egg size and parental care strategies in cichlids inhabiting Lake Tanganyika, one of the African Great Lakes.

Read now ahead of print!
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/739303

#Cichlids #LifeHistoryTheory #EEB

Kłodawska et al. examine visual opsin genes sequences and expression in Bermin crater lake cichlids, recovering little coding sequence divergence but high variation in expression profile, suggesting plasticity at the onset of sensory evolution.

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf286

#evobio #molbio #cichlids #opsins

The #rainbow #cichlids are growing on me for sure! Very active and busy.

I much prefer south american cichlids and the large variety they offer. I really don't understand why African cichlids are as popular as they are here. They offer good colors sure but nearly all come in the same physical shape and none of the personalities I've seen with SAs, well, except kribs. The #kribs are nice.

#aquarium #cichlid #fishkepeing

can't get any good footage of the #saulosi #cichlids. same #aquarium as the 'firefish', but the male is bullying the female (if it is a female, time will tell - since young males are also yellow before turning blue).

Final species arrived (Fire Fish)! With that, all new inhabitants has now been housed in their respective #aquarium!

Here is the list of the new species:

- Aulonocara sp. 'Fire Fish'
- Chindongo saulosi
- Pelvicachromis pulcher
- Herotilapia multispinosa
- Andinoacara pulcher
- Pterophyllum scalare
- Cleithracara maronii

Excited to see how this works out! Afaik the only #cichlids in my setup that might be a headache to breed are the fire fish

oh, the video almost ended up as a perfect loop 🤣

I did something I didn't think I'd ever do... I handed in some ~200 #guppies (most of my lines) and some ~2kg of #aquarium #moss to my LFS in exchange for #cichlids.

My plan going ahead is to focus first and foremost on larger species, keep just 6 large tanks with minimal maintenance instead of 28 small breeders that need daily work.

I'm also determined to switch my aquarium #plants focus to "minimal-work" #bucephalandra with possibly a small selection of other #rareplants.

Carruthers, @mgenner.bsky.social et al.integrate retinal transcriptomics, phenotypic analyses, and visual modeling to uncover rapid sensory divergence associated with an ecological transition between habitats with different light conditions.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf204

#evobio #molbio #cichlids

Just published 'Dietary Differentiation Between Sympatric #Ecotypes of #Astatotilapia calliptera From Lake Masoko, #Tanzania Revealed by Metabarcoding'! https://bit.ly/3GTRKjI Great to be part of this work led by Dr Kirthana Pillay (FSBI PhD). Nostalgic, given that my MSci thesis looked at the population genetics in these #cichlids in "Darwin's puddle"! Diet of the benthic and littoral ecomorphs differ, indicating resource partitioning, implicating trophic divergence with sympatric #speciation.
We now have FSBI PhD student Claudio Silva de Freitas who talks to us about ambient light and visual systems in #cichlids. Feeding brine shrimp under different light wavelengths to blue or green colour morphs, there was no difference in feed uptake. However, there do appear to be differences in gene expression #FSBI2025