About this map. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and click a dot to identify the species. The 8,037 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. Treat them as a guide to where a species lives, not exact spots: many records are georeferenced to a locality centroid (a nearby town or river mouth) rather than the precise catch site, some are historical or low-precision, and the occasional point may be a misidentification — knifefish are cryptic, nocturnal and hard to tell apart, and many species were long confused. Many narrow-range Amazonian knifefish have few public records — a sparse map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.
← Browse the Knifefishes index