Leptura mouthbrooders

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Leptura mouthbrooders
Xenotilapia leptura.jpg

Leptura mouthbrooders ( Xenotilapia leptura )

Systematics
Order : Cichliformes
Family : Cichlids (Cichlidae)
Subfamily : Pseudocrenilabrinae
Tribe : Ectodini
Genre : Xenotilapia
Type : Leptura mouthbrooders
Scientific name
Xenotilapia leptura
Boulenger , 1901

The Leptura mouthbrooder ( Xenotilapia leptura , Syn . : Asprotilapia leptura ) is an African cichlid species that is endemic to the East African Lake Tanganyika .

features

The Leptura mouthbrooder is elongated, laterally flattened and can reach a maximum length of 11 cm. The head is rounded, with the lower mouth it resembles that of the Labeotropheus species from Lake Malawi. The jaws are set with two rows of narrow teeth with slender shafts and three-pointed crowns. The tail stalk is extremely long. The caudal fin is forked. The dorsal fin has 14 hard rays , the anal fin has three, like most other cichlids. In a middle row on the sides of the body there are 38 scales.

Way of life

The Leptura mouthbrooder lives in large schools on the rocky shores of Lake Tanganyika and feeds on thread algae and unicellular algae. The fish are mouthbrooders that spawn together in a school. A clutch consists of 20 to 25 eggs. Groups of several hundred mouth-brooding females have been observed snuggling vertically, with their heads up or down, against large rocks.

Systematics

The Leptura mouthbrooder was first described in 1901 by the Belgian-British ichthyologist George Albert Boulenger under the scientific name Asprotilapia leptura and remained the only species in the genus. Two studies on the internal systematics of the genus Xenotilapia showed that this is paraphyletic if Asprotilapia is not synonymous with Xenotilapia . The Leptura mouthbrooder is therefore mostly listed as Xenotilapia leptura today . Common feature of the extended genus Xenotilapia are four dark ring bones (infraorbitalia) of which the foremost does not overlap the elongated second eye ring bones and has four or five sensory pores .

source

  • Pierre Brichard: The Big Book of Tanganyika Cichlids. With all the other fish on Lake Tanganyika. Bede Verlag GmbH. 1995, ISBN 978-3927997943 , pages 276-277.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Asprotilapia leptura in the Catalog of Fishes (English)
  2. ↑ Tetsumi Takahashi (2003): Systematics of Xenotilapia Boulenger, 1899 (Perciformes: Cichlidae) from Lake Tanganyika, Africa. Ichthyological Research, February 2003, Volume 50, Issue 1, 36-47.
  3. ↑ S. Koblmüller, W. Salzburg, C. Sturmbauer: Evolutionary Relationships in the Sand-Dwelling Cichlid Lineage of Lake Tanganyika Suggest Multiple Colonization of Rocky Habitats and Convergent Origin of Biparental Mouthbrooding PDF (556 KB) J Mol Evol (2004) 58: 79-96 DOI: 10.1007 / s00239-003-2527-1

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