About this map. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and click a dot to identify the species. The 34,338 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 (Serrasalmidae has been split hard in recent years, so many silver dollars are still indexed under a former genus such as Myleus, and pacus under Colossoma). 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 landing) 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 pacus in particular are farmed and released worldwide, so we keep only points that fall inside the native-range boxes of South America and Africa. Many small, recently-described characins have no public records yet — an empty map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.
← Browse the Piranha index