Aquarist Atlas · the barbs

Every barb on one map

16,843 georeferenced records across 862 species, drawn across the fresh waters of the Old World — the monsoon rivers and rice paddies of tropical Asia, the rivers of the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, the savanna streams of Africa, and the cooler barbel rivers of Europe and the Middle East. Colour the cloud by group — the Asian and Indian aquarium barbs, the small African barbs, the great mahseers and yellowfish, and the temperate barbels — or switch to compare mode and read two species’ ranges against each other.

© Adobe Stock

About this map. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and click a dot to identify the species. The 16,843 dots are real occurrence records pulled from GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility — an aggregator of museum specimens, scientific surveys and verified citizen-science sightings — queried for both each fish’s current name and its older genus combination (barb names have shifted a lot since 2012). Treat them as a guide to where a species lives, not exact spots: many records are georeferenced to a locality centroid (a nearby village or river mouth) rather than the precise catch site, some are historical or low-precision, and the occasional point may be a misidentification or a record from outside the native range. Many small African and recently-described Asian barbs have no public records yet — an empty map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.

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