Ewest and Rainman, you both are right. It's all semantics.
Bottom line is that different tilapiine cichlids have different preferred food sources that they will target IF AVAILABLE, but most of them will eat basically whatever they have to in order to survive.
Now, take a typical private pond. Most ponds are abundant in a variety of food sources on a tilapia's menu. Once they run out of their favorite food, they move down to the next favorite.
When introducing tilapia to a pond with a specific goal in mind (to reduce chara, to reduce FA, to cut down on detritus material, to cut down on vascular plants, etc.), some choices of tilapia may be better than others. For instance, If you have a type that prefers FA, and you really want to get rid of chara, you may not accomplish your goals if you have abundant enough FA available to them to make them happy. Then again, you really only have a choice between mozambiques, blues and niles in the continental US currently, and frankly, these three target pretty much the same stuff from all the data I've seen. They all do a pretty solid job at vegetation control, but according to a lot of the info out there, some of these other "rare" types to us in the US could potentially outperform them in a lot of situations as far as private pond vegetation control is concerned.
