Lake Victoria

Lake Victoria spans about 59,947 square kilometers across Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, making it Africa's largest lake and the world's largest tropical lake, with an average depth of 40 meters feeding the Nile River through its outlet at Jinja, Uganda. The lake was once home to more than 500 endemic haplochromine cichlid species that evolved over roughly 15,000 years, one of the fastest documented cases of vertebrate diversification. At least 200 of those species, around 40 percent, have gone extinct since the mid twentieth century, driven chiefly by the introduction of Nile perch along with eutrophication and habitat loss, a collapse often described as the most dramatic case of human caused extinction within a single ecosystem.