Aquarist Atlas · the killifishes

Every killifish on one map

11,558 georeferenced records across 676 species, drawn over the fresh waters of five continents — the seasonal pools of the African savanna and the South American Chaco, the rainforest streams of West Africa and the Amazon, the rice paddies of South Asia, the coastal mangroves of the Atlantic, and the desert springs and Mediterranean lagoons of the arid belt. Colour the cloud by group — the African and South American annuals, the rivulines, the panchax, the pupfish, the American killifish and the Mediterranean & Asian killies — or switch to compare mode and read two species’ ranges against each other.

About this map. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and click a dot to identify the species. The 11,558 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. Killifish taxonomy is unusually active — genera split and recombine constantly — so a few records sit under an older name and may not appear; and many newly-described single-pool annuals have no public records yet. An empty map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.

← Browse the Killifish index