Aquarist Atlas · suckermouth catfish

Every pleco on one map

10,382 georeferenced records across 778 species of Loricariidae, drawn over the fresh waters of South & Central America — the Amazon and Orinoco lowlands, the Guiana Shield, the Andean piedmont, and the Paraná–La Plata south. Colour the cloud by subfamily — the big Hypostominae (bristlenoses, commons and the L-number morphs), the whiptail Loricariinae, the dwarf Hypoptopomatinae and their 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 10,382 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 town 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. No coordinates are invented — but any single dot can sit a little off.

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