AquaLex catalog - Cichlids from Lake Tanganyika

Revisione

a cura di Juan Miguel Artigas Azas, 26-lug-1998.

Dähne Verlag editorial house has published this great pair of identification aids for the Tanganyikan cichlid aficionado, by Hans-Joachin Herrmann. The book, intended as a catalog, comes with a brief and concrete introduction in German and English about the lake, the habitats, and the keeping of the cichlids.

The main part of the book comes with 392 67x45 mm color pictures about most cichlid species and variants found in the lake, each picture is given an icon symbology with four icons representing aquarium size, nutrition, total length and habitat for the species represented. Many of the species are shown in their natural habitat. Nine more full page pictures show some specially beautiful photographs of species or habitats, rounding a total 401 color photographs.

The CD comes with all the information in the book in digital format, plus much more. Cichlids are grouped according to Poll (1978) in Bathybatini, Cyprichromini, Ectodini, Eretmodini, Haplochromini, Lamprologini, Limnochromini, Perissodini, Tilapini, Trematocarini, Tropheini and Tylochromini. A search facility which makes very easy to find any of them. In the CD format you can also find information for each genera, and instead of the icons found in the book, in the CD there is information about name, type species, group, taxonomy, distribution, characteristics and remarks. There is also additional text information for each of the species, like name, type locality, distribution, habitat, diet, characteristic, remarks, care, behavior and reproduction, plus icons found in the book. The habitat is in many cases represented by a picture, and when available, more than one picture of the species are present, including in many cases pictures of the females.

There are also a video on a virtual flight over lake Tanganyika, with a list of species of each of the passing points. And for the pictures, you can easily produce a slide show. A MS-word for windows manual document come with the CD. Additional information with pictures included covers an introduction about the author, the lake, the habitats and a list of literature.