Tropheus annectens "Bilila (Kavala) Island"
Bilila (Kavala) Island — bee-LEE-lah kah-VAH-lah 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 Tropheus annectens account →Specific to Bilila (Kavala) 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 Tropheus annectens.
The Bilila (Kavala) Island population
Tropheus annectens "Bilila (Kavala) Island" is the Bilila (Kavala) Island population of Tropheus annectens, a geographic colour form from the Democratic Republic of the Congo coast of Lake Tanganyika in the north-central part of the lake. It is the same species as Tropheus annectens, distinguished by its collection locality and local coloration; aquarists keep and breed it as a discrete, provenance-labelled line.
Colour reference: living Bilila (Kavala) Island fish at tanganyika.si →
About the species
Tropheus annectens is a small, algae-scraping cichlid endemic to Lake Tanganyika, found only on a handful of widely separated rocky shores on both sides of the lake. Described by George Albert Boulenger in 1900, it is one of just six recognized species in the famously variable genus Tropheus, and like its relatives it browses films of algae from rock in tightly knit foraging schools and broods its young in the mother's mouth. Because its world amounts to only a few dozen square kilometers of shallow reef, the IUCN reassessed it in 2025 as Endangered — a sharp reminder that a fish can be locally common and still be one bad decade of shoreline erosion away from trouble.
Full Tropheus annectens account →Sources
- tanganyika.si — Tropheus annectens 'Bilila (Kavala) Island'
- Tropheus annectens — FishBase species summary
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes — Tropheus annectens (species record)
- Speciation, DNA and Tropheus (A. Konings, Cichlids Yearbook 3, 1993)
- Sturmbauer & Meyer 1992 — Genetic divergence, speciation and morphological stasis in a lineage of African cichlid fishes, Nature 358:578–581 (reference record)
- Tropheus annectens — iNaturalist taxon page (status & taxonomy)
- O'Reilly et al. 2003 — Climate change decreases aquatic ecosystem productivity of Lake Tanganyika, Nature
- IUCN Red List — Tropheus annectens "Bilila (Kavala) Island"