Lake Tanganyika 

by Bill Baird

Lake Tanganyika is 450 miles long, 45 miles wide and 4,700 feet deep. Its nearest point to the sea, as the crow flies, is 600 miles from the Indian Ocean but the route its waters actually take is by a tributary of the Congo to the Atlantic. The surface of the lake is at 2,535 feet above sea level and may have stood at 4,000 feet in the recent geological past. 

Many creatures of a marine type such as jelly fish, crabs, prawns and gastropods, whose only living relatives are in the oceans, live in Lake Tanganyika. It has been suggested by Moore, 1898 that the zoological evidence shows a connection of the lake with the sea. Even more puzzling, is the fact that the other lakes of the rift valley to the north and south do not contain any of the halolimnic organisms of the Lake Tanganyika fauna. The full details of this fauna are given in "On the Zoological Evidence for the Connection of Lake Tanganyika with the Sea" by J.E.S. Moore, 1898, in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 62, p. 451-458.