Fish Relatives.

Fish Relatives.

Well guys i have an qeustion that has been on my mind for a while now but was always to shy to ask.

But it will bother me until i have found the answer,

Im a keen Fisher man and love the water and what is in it aswell. Further more a few weeks back on a angling compitition a member from our club cought a few kurpers and the question came up if the local Kurpers in our dams and river systema are in anyway related to some of the Ciclits that we keep in our tanks. and further more i heard a coment from one of the anglers that Kurpers are indeed related to malawi fish.

How true is this . any help will be appreciated
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Hi Fanie,

Thanks for your question which is a really interesting one. Sorry for only replying now, but I always battle to find the time to do everything.

Your fishing friends are perfectly correct, the kurpers that you guys catch in the north are mostly Mozambique kurpers (Oreochromis mossambicus), and they are related to all of the fishes from Lake Malawi. All of these fishes belong to the same group, or family as we call it scientifically, of the cichlids. The Malawi cichlids, although they differ so much in their shape, some are algae eaters, some are fish eaters, some are even eye, fin and scale biters, all evolved from a single ancestor, which may even have come from Lake Makgadikgadi in Botswana. This lake has now just about dried up, but previously there were river that flowed into Lake Makgadikgadi from the north. These rivers now flow into the Zambezi over the Vic Falls and no longer flow into the lake. However in years gone by these fishes managed to find their way into Lake Malawi and then they adapted to form all of the different forms that you now see if the local petshop. The cichlids from Lake Tanganyika are older and are more distantly related to the cichlids from Lake Malawi, but they certainly are also related.

By now there are beautiful descriptions about how the Malawi cichlids evolved and we have many scientific studies to prove this to be correct. But yes, your common kurper is related to the fishes from Lake Malawi, that is for sure.

Hope you catch some nice ones this weekend!

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Good Day Sir.

Thank u for the response , I jus learned somthing that i never knew in my 26 Tears of Fish Keeping ,

Thank u very Much.

P.S I Will post some pics of the fish we catch soon.

Kind Regards

Fanie Lindeque

 

Hi Prof and Fanie. Prof would know this but its very interesting to me. I have watch a national geo of discovery channel about the different cichlids and how they evolved. Long ago the lakes dried about half and that caused the lake to seperate into many smaller lakes isolating groups of fishes. They evolve seperately and over time became different in apearance and feeding etc. When the lake filled up again(over many many years of even centuries) al these different cichlids came together again.