Lake Tanganyika, the biggest freshwater ecosystem in Africa, is famous for its huge species richness and has attracted scientists for over a century-. Due to the rapid and adaptive speciation processes, the most diverse vertebrate family are cichlids with more than 200 species described (1). However, one of the important ecological life strategies has been overlooked. While the global diversity of parasites at least two times exceeds that of free-living life forms, only a slight portion of it was documented in the lake. One of the class, monogeneans, has received more attention during the last years with 28 already described species with a majority of strict specialists reported from the littoral habitat (2). In contrast to the species-rich littora