Maylandia pulpican

According to IUCN, this cichlid is common along certain parts of the Mozambiquan coast of Lake Malawi. The water of this lake is warm, oxygen rich and hard.

If you have information about or footage of this fish in the wild, please reach out to us.

It is hard to write some definite on these fish, since it is hard to identify them in the first place. There are rather a few blue-black striped dwarf cichlids from Lake Malawi. One species of these has yellow females. Not mine. I held them for Pseudotropheus demasoni for a while, but was chastised online for being wrong about that. Demasoni, true enough, has black dorsal fins. My fish don't. Most likely they are Maylandia pulpican (or P. kingsizei - ever decade has its prefered scientific name).

Whichever they are - they are aggressive and territorial fish. The good old Mbuna wisdom holds up: keep males overstocked. For breeding purposes, I believe one male with three females would work best.

They are maternal mooth brooders, and the after two weeks or so of holding, the fry can be pried from the female's mouth, enabling her to eat (or breed) again. At that point, they are big enough to take baby brine shrimp, but keep in mind that these fish are mostly vegetarian and should primarily be fed algae-based foods (like crushed spirulina flakes).