Aquarist Atlas · the pufferfish

Every freshwater & brackish puffer on one map

905 georeferenced records across 30 species, drawn across three continents — the Nile and the rivers and estuaries of West and Central Africa, the floodplains of India and the Mekong, the brackish mangrove coasts of Southeast Asia, and the Amazon. Colour the cloud by group — the dwarf puffers, the Southeast Asian river puffers, the brackish estuary puffers, the African puffers and the South American puffers — 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 905 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 (the old worldwide genus Tetraodon was split, so many records are still filed under it). 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, an aquarium release, or a record from outside the native range. Several little-collected puffers have few public records — a sparse map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.

← Browse the Pufferfish index