Tropheus Tanganyika

Tropheus Tanganyika website header. Image from https://tropheus.com.pl/.

If you’re a Lake Tanganyika enthusiast, there are two rather obscure resources (at least in the United States) that you may be interested in – a website and a printed magazine, both from the same proprietor. The magazine, Tanganyika Magazine, is the only serial that I am aware of (in English) dedicated to cichlids from a specific body of water.

Published by Tropheus Tanganyika, a Polish online website and fish vendor, the magazine appears to be chock-full of great cichlid information. The website is in Polish and English, but unless you can read Polish, you may need to select English upon visiting because the site doesn’t automatically convert based upon your IP address (if coming from an English speaking IP range). Depending on the browser you use, the method presented to choose English will vary. I use several browsers, including Brave, which will give you an on-page text option near the top right of the webpage to select Polish or English. Other browsers may not offer this but should have their own built in method for choosing the language (or translating it for you).  It’s obvious that the English language webpages are auto-translated (i.e., not translated by a human), but they are still legible. 

In addition to selling fish, the website appears to contain a lot of useful information about cichlids and fish keeping in general. I was more interested in the magazine, so I visited the site to check out the subscription costs. Information about acquiring the magazine is not very clear on the website, so I reached out to them with some questions. 

There is no yearly subscription at present. Pricing is per single issue and varies depending on the size (e.g., # of pages) of the issue. You can view the table of contents of each issue, however not every issue provides page numbers, so it’s hard to tell how consistent the sizes are. It appears the latest issue (#32) is over 100 pages. The English webpage that provides pricing per issue still lists the costs in Polish currency, which is Zloty and appears as “PLN” for the price, so you’ll have to convert that to US dollars. The latest issue is 65 PLN, which converts to $15.67 (US) on yesterday’s exchange. Just to ship issue #32 to me is $16 (US), which makes the cost over $30 for a single issue. That’s pretty expensive and more than I am willing to pay. 

 

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