Lake Victoria

Lake Victoria is my favorite lake out of the 3 main Cichlid lakes in Africa. It is very unique with species and the history of the lake is unbelievable! I promise you after you read a little about this wonderful lake you will be inspired to get yourself some Victorian species and help the others who take conservation seriously.

Lake Victoria is very young if you compare it to other lakes on this planet. Samples of the lake hint that it is around 13,000 years old. If this is the case then Victorian species evolved rapidly in a very short period of time. Which if you have ever kept a breeding group you would know this. Most are very prolific if the settings are correct.


Lake Victoria is 26,600 square miles in size, making it the continent's largest lake, the largest tropical lake in the world, and the second widest fresh water lake in the world in terms of surface area. Being relatively shallow for its size, with a maximum depth of 276 feet and a mean depth of 131 feet, Lake Victoria ranks as the seventh largest freshwater lake by volume, containing 2.2 million acre-feet of water.

Lake Victoria receives most of its water from direct precipitation or from thousands of small streams. The largest stream flowing into this lake is the Kagera River, the mouth of which lies on the lake's western shore. Lake Victoria lies within an elevated plateau in the western part of Africa's Great Rift Valley and is subject to territorial administration by Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.

Lake Victoria has a shoreline of 2,138 miles, and has more than 3,000 islands. These include the Ssese Islands in Uganda, a large group of islands in the northwest of the lake that are becoming a popular destination for tourists.
Today, Lake Victoria in East Africa is one of the most populous regions in the world. The lake provides food, transport, and electricity to more than 30 million people.

Before the 1950’s, Lake Victoria's ecology was outstanding and there was so much biodiversity. It was inhabited by over 500 species of fish, 90% of which were cichlids belonging to the Haplochromis species. Plenty of action, so much purity, so much life.

Fishing pressure on the lake began to intensify in the early 1900's when the British introduced flax gill nets, which soon replaced the local villagers' papyrus nets and fish traps. With overfishing, catch sizes began to drop; fishermen turned to nets with ever smaller mesh sizes and thus decimated both the breeding adults and young of many native species. By the 1950s the ngege was commercially extinct and the labeo was not far behind. To compensate, British officials decided to stock the lake with new fish. The first nonnative species of tilapia (Cichlidae), that prospered was the Nile tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus, which feeds on the minute forms of plant and animal life called plankton, introduced in the early 1950s. In 1955 the Nile Perch Lates nicloticus (Centropomidae) was introduced into Lake Kioga, and when a few years later it was found in Lake Victoria, steps were taken to ensure its establishment there.

Despite such changes, the Haplochromines appeared to be thriving in the 1950s. In fact, they appeared so robust that some colonial administrators favored introducing a big predator like the Nile perch to eat what they considered bony little "trash" fish and
"convert the Haplochromine biomass" into something more able for the restaurant table. Ecologists, fearing the worst for local species, strongly opposed the predator. But in 1954 illicit Nile perch began appearing in commercial catches anyway. Since the
dirty deed was done, officials continued to stock the lake with perch in the early 1960s. (Ogari suspects perch were first slipped into the lake by colonial sportsmen, just as homesick British anglers put trout into highland streams throughout eastern and southern Africa.) Still, for the next decade or so, the alien perch population remained small. A United Nations-sponsored survey completed in 1971 found that Haplochromines still made up 80 percent of the lake's fish biomass.

Then came what Pereti Basasibwaki, a Fisheries Research Institute biologist, calls the dark period, the years between 1974 and 1979 when Amin cut off access to the lake. Until 1978, Nile Perch remained a very small proportion of the commercial catch, less than 5 percent. It wasn't until 1979 that the Kenyan government took over the idle Kisumu facility and work resumed under ICMFRI's auspices. Pilot surveys suggested the lake's fish biomass was unchanged: it still appeared to consist of 80 percent Haplochromines and less than 2 percent Nile perch. But in 1980 an abrupt change showed up in Kenyan waters, and within two years it appeared in Ugandan and Tanzanian waters too. Nile perch suddenly jumped to 80 percent of the biomass, and Haplochromines dropped to 1 percent. Ngege, already rare, virtually disappeared. Clearly
something had been building during the unmonitored 1970s to cause such a massive explosion of perch. As for the Haplochromines, the leading theory is that they simply provided the predator's fodder. However, when Nile Perch were introduced into Lake Victoria some 30 years ago to improve game fishing, few would even have guessed that
it might cause the elimination of whole species and the degradation of the area surrounding the lake. Then in 1978 a very rapid expansion of the proportion accounted for by Nile Perch took place, with the result that by 1990 the commercial catch had a
totally different composition, dominated by Nile Perch (almost 60 percent) and Omena (most of the remaining 40 percent). The Haplochromines, and the mixture of other fish had virtually vanished from the commercial catch.

Today people like Greg Steeves, Nick Andreola, Troy Veltrop, many other hobbyists and I are pushing to keep these rare species going. Lake Victoria today is a muddy, murky, polluted lake and it is also overstocked with predator fish that kill anything in site.

After reading this I would hope that you have learned a little history about the lake and are interested in keeping a Victorian species of some sort. We need hobbyist to step up and offer a spot for a few of these species in there homes. Breed them and spread the love! Conservation is key to keeping them around. So again please open up a tank for these little critters you won't regret it!


Sources
http://www.hillcountrycichlidclub.com/articles/Lake%20Victoria%20History.pdf –Greg S.
-Wikipedia
-Large Lakes Observatory, University of Minnesota
- TED Case Studies: Lake Victoria

Bump.

I revamped it a little. Adding more later as well.

lake tang is better lol.

I love my vics!

My vote is Madagascar!! I do keep fish from other lakes though.

i love my vics also
ill always have tanks for vics

great photos

good info korry. i wish i could find vics in alabama. but we dont have much to choose from here

I love my Vics and have another female holding.

By the way did anyone watch Science channel tonight? Particularly Mutant Planet:
Africa's Rift Valley Lakes ? I don't get that channel so I missed it.

Yea great show, lots of good shots of all the fish. Amazing how these fish survive.

This article should push all fishkeeper to adopt any fish that is going to be let loose in the wild. A whole ecology was altered by a non native species.And think twice about hybrids. I know a lot of the shallow areas were destroyed by logger and lost the vegetation where hap fry would grow. Most lake vic cichlids are now breed in tanks because they are extinct in the wild.

I found this doing some research of the lakes, it made me sick.. people dont stop breeding!! (discretion is advised)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfNmzMhMGgk

wow that was crazy



like it said please fellow hobbyist devote tank space to an endangered species and help preserve

This article I wrote made this months Fish Tales and Lateral Line