Aulonocara stuartgranti "Usisya"
Usisya — oo-SEE-syah (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 Usisya
- 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 Usisya population
The Usisya Peacock is a geographic colour form of Aulonocara stuartgranti collected near Usisya on Malawi's western shore. Males display a warm yellow-orange body with a metallic blue head — colouration that is distinct enough from other location variants to be tracked as its own line in the specialist hobby, where crossing populations of stuartgranti is treated as hybridisation.
Colour reference: living Usisya 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 and the fisheries. Fisheries Research