About this map. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and click a dot to identify the species. The 7,896 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 (Cobitoidea has been heavily reshuffled — the old Botia split into several genera, the kuhlis moved from Acanthophthalmus to Pangio, and many stone loaches still sit underNemacheilus or Noemacheilus). 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 reach) rather than the precise catch site, some are historical or low-precision, and the occasional point may be a misidentification, an aquaculture record, or a feral occurrence well outside the native range — the dojo loach, for instance, has escaped into North America and Australia, which the native-range boxes deliberately exclude. Many small, recently-described stream loaches have no public records yet — an empty map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.
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