Altolamprologus calvus "Nkamba Bay"
Nkamba Bay — n-KAHM-bah BAY (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 Nkamba Bay
- 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 Nkamba Bay population
The Nkamba Bay calvus is a pearl-white, black-barred form of Altolamprologus calvus from the southeastern Zambian shore of Lake Tanganyika, collected near the export port of Mpulungu. Everything about the fish is built around the rock crevice: flanks compressed to a knife's edge, thick armour-like scales, and a profile thin enough to slip into gaps barely wider than the body is long. It hunts in those crevices and spawns in them too — an ecological specialist that also happens to be one of the lake's more striking display cichlids. Almost every one in the trade is wild-caught near Mpulungu rather than tank-bred, so a Nkamba Bay calvus in a shop began its life on that Zambian reef.
Colour reference: living Nkamba Bay 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