Aulonocara stuartgranti "Domwe Island"
Domwe Island — DOHM-weh EYE-land (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 Aulonocara stuartgranti account →Specific to Domwe Island
- 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 Aulonocara stuartgranti.
The Domwe Island population
The Domwe Island Peacock is a locality form of Aulonocara stuartgranti collected from the rocky shorelines of Domwe Island, a small island situated close to Thumbi West Island in the sheltered Cape Maclear bay at approximately 13°58'S — within or immediately adjacent to the Lake Malawi National Park. Males express orange-yellow flanks paired with a metallic blue head, a coloration pattern that differs in saturation and hue from the stuartgranti populations found at Thumbi West Island and at more northerly sites such as Ngara. The specialist cichlid hobby tracks this form as a distinct locality line because populations of stuartgranti differ measurably in male nuptial colour from site to site, and mixing locality forms in captivity degrades the population-specific phenotypes that breeders and collectors work to preserve.
Colour reference: living Domwe Island fish at cichlidae.com →
About the species
Aulonocara stuartgranti, known in the hobby as Grant's peacock, is a maternal mouthbrooding cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi and one of the most familiar faces in the African-cichlid hobby. It is the archetypal "peacock": a sand-and-rock fish that hovers a few millimeters above the bottom and detects buried invertebrates with the enlarged lateral-line canals pitting its lower jaw — a sixth-sense feeding system confirmed in the lab on this very species. Across the lake it splits into dozens of vividly distinct geographic colour forms, from the orange-tailed Ngara "flametail" to the blue Usisya and Cobue, which is exactly why it is both beloved and a perennial hybridization headache for keepers.
Full Aulonocara stuartgranti account →Sources
- Konings, A. & Stauffer, J.R. Jr. (1988). Original description of Aulonocara stuartgranti
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Aulonocara stuartgranti
- Schwalbe, A.M.B., Bassett, D.K. & Webb, J.F. (2012). Feeding in the dark: lateral-line-mediated prey detection in Aulonocara stuartgranti. J. Exp. Biol. 215: 2060–2071
- Konings, A. (2016). Malawi Cichlids in their Natural Habitat, 5th ed. Cichlid Press
- IUCN Red List — Aulonocara stuartgranti (2018)
- FishBase — Aulonocara stuartgranti
- Cichlid Room Companion — Aulonocara stuartgranti
- Chavula, G. et al. (2023). Threats to Lake Malawi biodiversity. Fisheries Research