Male with fry
A male of Hemichromis fasciatus with fry in the aquarium of Oliver Lucanus; Montreal, Canada. Photo by Oliver Lucanus. determiner Anton Lamboj

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Last updated on:
21-Dec-2010

Hemichromis frempongi Loiselle, 1979


04-Feb-2021 — New species of Hemichromis described
By Juan Miguel Artigas Azas

A work on the five-spotted group of Hemichromis from West Africa has recently been published in the journal Hydrobiologia, the paper is authored by Arnold Roger Bitja-Nyom, Jean-François Agnèse, Antoine Pariselle, Charles Félix Bilong-Bilong, André Gilles, and Jos Snoeks. The study includes the result of a mitochondrial DNA comparison for three Hemichromis species (fasciatus, frempongi and elongatus) from 100 populations from Senegal east and south to Gabon (no samplings were made in Angola). The resulting phylogenetic tree is formed by two clusters. The first (western and northernmost) cluster produced four clades (subgroups): one of them include what we know as H. fasciatus and H. frempongi, and hence the authors propose the synonymy of the latter with the former. The other three clades are formed by different populations of the southern H. elongatus. The second cluster, formed by three different clades from populations from Cameroon, has been described as a new species, Hemichromis camerounensis, with populations in Cameroon and Nigeria. The diagnosis is given as “two distinct red opercular spots on either side of the single large black opercular spot”. Unfortunately, this diagnosis appears not be applicable since many individuals in the populations of H. elongatus south to Angola show the same feature.

Bitja-Nyom, Arnold Roger & Jean-François Agnèse, Antoine Pariselle, Charles Félix Bilong-Bilong, André Gilles, Jos Snoeks. 2021. "A systematic revision of the five-spotted Hemichromis complex (Cichliformes: Cichlidae) from West Africa and Lower Guinea, with the description of a new species from Cameroon". Hydrobiologia. 848: 3779–3803. DOI: 10.1007/s10750-020-04506-5 (crc11122) (abstract)