West African lungfish

Length

Up to 100 cm

Body shape

Elongated

Group

Missing

Smallest aquarium

21,000 liters

Diet

Missing

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Temperament

Aggressive

Swims

Missing

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Temperature

Tolerates25–30 °C

pH

–

Obligate air-breathing. Found in marginal swamps and backwaters of rivers and lakes. Carnivorous, food includes molluscs, but also frogs, fish and seed. In Kenya it feeds mostly on plant material, like roots. Strongly associated with life of aquatic plants in terms of breeding and feeding ecologies; nests are made in weedy areas. Normally lives on flood plains and secretes, when these dry up during the dry season, a thin slime around itself which dries into a fragile cocoon; normally hibernates from the end of one wet season to the start of the next, buut can live in its cocoon for over a year. For hibernating the fish literally chews its way into the substrate ejecting mud out of its gill openings, reaching a depth of 3-25 cm below the surface depending on the length of the fish; the lungfish wriggles around, thereby hollowing out a bulb-shaped chamber and coming to rest with its nose pointing upward; they breathe air at the mouth of the chamber's tube and then sink back into the expanded part of the chamber. As the water disappears the respiratory trips cease; air reaches the fish via the tube to the surface. Under aquatic conditions this lungfish can survive more than three and half years of starvation, showing the same behavior - no motion and same body posture - as an aestivating specimen.