Lead organisation: Tanganyika Blue
Country: Tanzania
Lake Tanganyika’s fish catch is rapidly declining threatening food security and livelihood across the region. Without viable alternatives farmers will turn to invasive Nile tilapia, endangering endemic biodiversity. Tanganyika Blue aims to create the basin’s first nature-positive breeding nucleus for the endemic Tanganyika tilapia in Tanzania, turning the looming biodiversity threat from invasive aquaculture into a conservation asset. The project will construct a dedicated breeding facility, design a scientifically sound breeding plan, and scale the nucleus brood-stock to 3000 fish sourced evenly from five lake districts. It will also train fifteen Tanganyika Blue staff, forty community members and twenty government officials. Using a closed DNA-verified brood-stock, the program will combine quantitative genetics with low-cost SNP markers to improve growth by 10% per generation and trim feed conversion by 0.2, reaching Nile-tilapia parity within five generations. By offering competitive native seed, the initiative will make aquaculture profitable, reduce pressure on wild stocks, and eliminate the incentive to introduce invasive species.