Aquarist Atlas · the genus Betta

Every wild betta on one map

668 georeferenced records across 78 species, drawn over the fresh waters of Southeast Asia — the rice paddies and ditches of the Mekong and Chao Phraya basins, the blackwater peat swamps of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, and the forest streams of Borneo. Colour the cloud by species group — the bubble-nesting splendens and coccina groups against the paternal mouthbrooders (pugnax, picta, unimaculata, waseri and kin) — or switch to compare mode and read two species’ ranges against each other.

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About this map. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and click a dot to identify the species. The 668 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 genus combination. 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. Several recently-described peat-swamp endemics have no public records yet — an empty map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.

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