Altolamprologus calvus "Cape Chaitika"Cape Chaitika Calvus
Altolamprologus calvus (Black Congo, Black Pectoral, Cape Chaitika, Cape Kachese, Cape Kapembwa, Cape Nangu, Chisanze, Kapampa, Katete, Kitumba, Livua, Lupota, Moliro, Mtoto, Nkamba Bay, Nzwema, Sumbu)
Cape Chaitika — KAYP chah-ee-TEE-kah (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 Altolamprologus calvus account →Specific to Cape Chaitika
- 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 Altolamprologus calvus.
The Cape Chaitika population
The Cape Chaitika form of Altolamprologus calvus is one of the pale Zambian locality variants — a white to creamy-white body crossed by bold black bars, with a crisp spot marking each scale row. It is collected from the rocky shores near Cape Chaitika, in the Sumbu National Park area of northern Zambia, at roughly 8°09'S on the lake's eastern shoreline. Far enough south of the DRC populations to have settled on a consistently paler look, this form is bought and bred for that near-white ground — and the value comes with a catch: cross it with calvus from another collection point and the pale colour muddies within a generation. Serious Tanganyika keepers therefore source Cape Chaitika fish specifically to hold a locality-pure line.
Colour reference: living Cape Chaitika fish at seriouslyfish.com →
About the species
Altolamprologus calvus — the pearly or black calvus — is a slender, armor-scaled predatory cichlid found only along the rocky southwestern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Its body is so strongly flattened from side to side that it can slip into rock cracks too narrow for almost any rival or predator — a build that doubles as a hunting tool and as the basis of an unusual breeding trick, in which the female spawns inside a crevice too small for the male to follow. Patient, deliberate, and slow-growing, it ranks among the lake's most coveted aquarium fish, and its fortunes are now tied to the silting of the very shoreline it depends on.
Full Altolamprologus calvus account →Sources
- Poll, M. (1978). Contribution à la faune ichthyologique du lac Tanganika. Bulletin de l'Académie Royale de Belgique 64: 725–758
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Altolamprologus calvus
- FishBase — Altolamprologus calvus
- Konings, A. (2015). Tanganyika Cichlids in their Natural Habitat, 3rd ed. Cichlid Press
- IUCN Red List — Altolamprologus calvus (Near Threatened, 2025)
- Seriously Fish — Altolamprologus calvus
- Cichlid Room Companion — Altolamprologus calvus
- cichlid-forum.com — Altolamprologus keeping and breeding