Neolamprologus brichardi

Endemic to Lake Tanganyika, where it's recorded from the shores of Burundi, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Fish with the brichardi head pattern live mainly in the northern half of the lake, and N. pulcher takes its place further south (see 'Notes').

The first fish exported for the hobby, in 1971, came from Magara on the Burundi coast (Konings, 1993).

Type locality is Kasoje, on the Tanzanian shore near the Mahale Mountains.

Rocky shoreline, mostly between 5 and 25 m deep (Konings, 1993). It gathers in large groups that can look like shoals, but most adults in them live as breeding pairs. It hovers up to a metre above the rocks to feed on plankton (Hori et al., 1983; Konings, 1993).

A single pair can be kept in a tank 80 cm long. If you want to keep a family group and see the young helping to raise later broods (see 'Reproduction'), use something with a base of at least 120 cm by 30 cm.

Set the tank up like the rocky shore of Lake Tanganyika, with piles of rock arranged to form caves over much of the aquarium and a sandy substrate. It needs hard, alkaline water.

In the lake it feeds mainly on plankton picked from open water above the rocks (Hori et al., 1983).

In the aquarium it takes most foods. Live and frozen foods should make up a large part of the diet, with dried foods offered less often. Include some vegetable matter, such as spirulina or blanched spinach.

A territorial fish that defends its patch persistently (Konings, 1993), and more so when it has fry. It's best kept in a species tank.

In a large aquarium it can live with other small to medium-sized Tanganyikan cichlids that use different parts of the tank, such as Cyprichromis or shell-dwelling species. Other rock-dwellers such as Julidochromis or Altolamprologus are only possible where the tank is big enough for each fish to hold a territory, with rockwork breaking up the lines of sight.

Don't keep it with other members of the brichardi complex, because they hybridise (see 'Notes').

Not easy to sex. Adult males are usually a little larger than females and grow longer extensions to the dorsal and caudal fins.

A cave spawner, and one of the easier Tanganyikan cichlids to breed. Pairs form within a group, so unless you can buy a bonded pair, start with at least six young fish and take out the extras once a pair has formed.

The pair spawns out of sight in a cave, often one they dig out themselves, and the eggs are laid on its wall or roof. The female usually tends the eggs while the male guards the area around the cave. The fry are large enough to take newly hatched brine shrimp from the start, but they grow slowly.

Older young stay in the parents' territory and help defend the broods that follow. Staats (1972) described this in aquarium fish, and it happens in the lake too, where many breeding pairs share one stretch of rock (Konings, 1993). Several generations can live together in one tank, but once space runs out the adults lay fewer eggs or eat the smallest fry. If you want to raise good numbers, move the fry to a rearing tank.

Known in the hobby as the Princess of Burundi, the trade name it was given when the first fish were exported from Burundi in 1971 (Konings, 1993).

Trewavas and Poll described it in 1952 as a subspecies of N. savoryi, Lamprologus savoryi elongatus. That name was already taken by Boulenger's Lamprologus elongatus of 1898, now Lepidiolamprologus elongatus, so Poll renamed the fish Lamprologus brichardi in 1974 after the exporter Pierre Brichard. It was called Neolamprologus elongatus for a while in the 1980s, until Burgess (1988) pointed out that the name had never been available for it (Konings, 1993).

It's most easily confused with N. pulcher, described in the same 1952 paper. Both have two dark bars on the gill cover. In N. brichardi one bar runs back and down from the eye and meets a vertical bar on the rear edge of the gill cover, so together they look like a T lying on its side. In N. pulcher the bar behind the eye curves down along the edge of the preopercle and runs parallel to the second bar without meeting it (Trewavas and Poll, 1952; Konings, 1993).

Other differences have been described from fish photographed in the lake. N. pulcher has a yellow ring around the eye, a plain cheek and rows of small orange or red dots along the body, and looks deeper-bodied. N. brichardi has no yellow eye ring, often has irregular blue or yellow lines on the cheek, never shows orange or red dots, and has shorter tips to the caudal fin (African Diving, 2017). The two also differ in range, with N. brichardi in the north of the lake and N. pulcher in the south.

Yellow fins are not a reliable guide on their own. Konings (1993) treats the 'Daffodil', which has yellow unpaired fins at every age, as a form of N. pulcher, because its gill-cover bars follow the pulcher pattern.

Not everyone accepts that these are two species. Duftner et al. (2007) found that mitochondrial DNA from populations around the lake does not sort by head pattern, and concluded that the brichardi pattern has evolved more than once from pulcher-type ancestors. They proposed treating all of them as one species under the older name, N. pulcher. FishBase still lists both species, and so do we.

It belongs to the so-called brichardi complex, with N. pulcher, N. savoryi, N. splendens, N. falcicula, N. gracilis, N. crassus and others. These hybridise freely and should not be mixed in aquaria.