A Little Fish in Deep Water

The ‘Best of Festival Wildscreen' winner, and a multi award-winning film from Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone, narrated by Ian Holm. The extraordinary story of how the oldest lake in Africa has evolved a freshwater community that is found nowhere else in the world. This is the story of how one little fish, against all the odds, has conquered a lake. Lake Tanganyika is an ‘ocean in Africa’. It has been colonised by a fish called ‘cichlid’. Otters, crocodiles, cobras, cormorants, kingfishers and ospreys all hunt the little fish in clear water. How the cichlid survived and evolved is an incredible story - for millions of years later there are over 200 new species - found only in Lake Tanganyika. Incredibly they have evolved to look like coral-reef fish. There are cichlid equivalents of tuna, snapper, gobies and goatfish. They have evolved bizarre methods of breeding, with mouth incubation, lekking and, unique amongst fish, there is even a cuckoo. Despite all their specialisations over millions of years - if an opportunity presents itself, all the fish can behave like their unspecialised ancestor. In the climax to the film, the cichlids shoal together to feast on the annual hatch of sardine fry.