Kampango

The ray-finned fish

Kampango is a ray-finned fish in the family Bagridae (order Siluriformes) — Bagrus meridionalis.

Range and habitat

The Kampango or kampoyo is a critically endangered species of large and predatory bagrid catfish that is endemic to Lake Malawi, Lake Malombe and the upper Shire River in Africa. It prefers areas near rocks in water shallower than 50 m (160 ft), but it also occurs deeper (not beyond the oxygen limit) and over a sandy or muddy bottom.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

During the day kampangos hide in caves, but around dusk or dawn they hunt and eat their prey, primarily cichlids. The male digs a shallow nest in the sandy bottom, often near rocks, where the female lays several thousand eggs.

After hatching, the young mostly eat trophic (unfertilized) egg that their mother lays, but they also take invertebrates that the father brings to them in his mouth. The young Kampango only leave the protection of their parents when around 12 cm (4.7 in) long, but before that most have typically already been eaten by egg- and fry-stealing cichlids like Mylochromis melanonotus and Pseudotropheus crabro.

In crisis

Kampango is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Kampango, Wikidata item Q3757658. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.