Aquarist Atlas · the pygmy sunfishes

Every pygmy sunfish on one map

452 georeferenced records across 7 species, drawn across the southeastern United States — the only place on Earth the Elassomatidae live. They range from the Carolina coastal plain south through the Okefenokee and the Florida peninsula, west along the Gulf, and up the Mississippi lowlands to southern Illinois. Colour the cloud by range group — from the wide-ranging banded pygmy sunfish to the single-spring-system spring pygmy sunfish — 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 452 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 — several pygmy sunfishes are hard to tell apart, and records of E. okefenokee from before the 2009 description of E. gilberti may refer to either species. Some species have few public records — a sparse map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.

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