Ophthalmotilapia Ventralis Nyanza Lac???

[Dhonti]

The fishes (2/2) in the pictures are sold to me as O. ventralis Nyanza Lac but can anyone tell me what species this really is?

(Please forgive me the quality of the pictures because it is taken from a very old tank)

One of the males:


and the female:

[Bo]

Its very hard too say. But i think the body is a bit too high for ventralis.
Maybe O. heterodonta?

[cyatide]

Hi Dhonti,

I agree with Bo, those are O. heterodonta!
I had kept them many years ago.

The male in breeding dress, with his blue-black body and bright blue fins, is very nice!
You will enjoy them for sure!

Cheers, paolo

[Philippe Burnel]

Yes it's the so called "heterodonta". The problem is to know if this variety really belongs to O. heterodonta because O. heterodonta is described from the north west coast, Mboko.
It seems that it's really difficult to get fish from the type locality.
As anyone ever seen the true heterodonta ?

below the Nyanza/kigoma variety

[sidguppy]

I've kept the heterodonta; was my first Featherfin. mine looked exactly like the pic supplied by Philippe, only a fair bit darker, almost black body. but since they were generation 'X' (species hasn't been imported for many years) there was no way of telling wich generation or the type locality.

but from the 7 I eventually got hold of, 5 turned out to be males; it didn't become a succes story. I lost a few to diseases (wrong food, wrong companions) and the reminding males decided to jump the tank.

once I had them spawning, but back then I only had 1 tank, so you can imagine what happened to the fry.

After that I tried ventralis, blew em up with BLOAT (nobody told me they were almost as fragile as Tropheus, back then) and hence ditched the idea of keeping featherfins for years.

Dhonti, I completely forgot to tell you last night, but you should put a few slanted pieces of slate or flagstone in the tank.

in a bare tank the heterodonta makes a little pit, but supplied with a wall of rock it does what it's supposed to do; build a half moon (crescent) shaped crater against a rock. for reasons unknown to me they do not build such a pit against a window, at least they didn't here. not even the back panels. they like rocks.
these craters are deep with a steep wall.
It's also fun to mix a few gravel in with the sand and ditch it in the crater; the male will carefully sieve the sand and collect all the gravel to put it outside, he only wants the finest sand in the pit.

you can keep them fairly busy this way.

[Dhonti]

Thanks for the answers, I had an Idea it could be heterodonta but now I know for sure.

The male is already making a crater between a few rocks. I have to redecorate the rest of the tank a bit so that the other male can do his thing also although he is missing an eye, he is challaging the dominant male.

The females are about 6cm (2.5") and the 2nd male is 7,5cm (3") and the dominant male is around 10cm (4").

There have to be removed some fishes from that tank but I'm curious how they are going to behave when it's a little less crowded. I'm planning on keeping them together with the X. sima (?) from the other topic (no other fish).