Rainbowfish · waters

The waters behind the fish

Rainbowfish are creatures of specific water: a karst spring on the Bird’s Head, a tannin-dark Sepik oxbow, a cold highland lake, a monsoon-pulsed river of the Australian north, an ancient Sulawesi lake, a clear Madagascan forest stream. Knowing which system a species comes from — its flow regime and water chemistry — is the foundation of keeping it well. Here are the freshwater systems that shaped 141 of the 166 species in this atlas.

Madagascar

16 species

Western Indian Ocean · Madagascar

The island endemics — the Bedotiidae. Bedotia and Rheocles live in the clear, fast forest streams and a few lakes of eastern and northern Madagascar, an isolated radiation now among the most threatened freshwater fishes on Earth as their forests are cleared and invasive species spread.

Sulawesi ancient lakes

17 species

Wallacea · Sulawesi (Celebes)

The sailfin silversides (Telmatherinidae) and their kin, flocked into the ancient Malili lake system — Towuti, Matano, Mahalona — and the Maros karst streams. A textbook adaptive radiation of lake-bound species, several known from a single lake and squeezed by nickel mining and introduced predators.

Vogelkop & the Bird's Head

43 species

New Guinea · West Papua (Indonesia)

The Bird's Head (Vogelkop) and Bird's Neck of far-western New Guinea — a karst country of spring-fed creeks and small lakes that has produced a remarkable density of narrow-range Melanotaenia, many described only in the last two decades and each tied to a single drainage.

Mamberamo & the northern lakes

14 species

New Guinea · north-central West Papua

The vast Mamberamo basin and the rainforest lakes of the north coast — Lake Sentani near Jayapura, Danau Bira (Lake Holmes), and the Cenderawasih Bay drainages. Home of the dwarf neon rainbowfish (Melanotaenia praecox) and the red rainbowfish of Lake Sentani (Glossolepis incisa).

Sepik–Ramu & the north coast

9 species

New Guinea · northern Papua New Guinea

The great Sepik–Ramu floodplains and the short north-coast rivers — the Markham, the Gogol, and the Lae-region streams. A lowland world of slow, tannin-tinged channels and oxbow lakes where Glossolepis and the larger Melanotaenia shoal.

Fly River & the southern lowlands

17 species

New Guinea · southern New Guinea

The Fly and its neighbours draining the southern slope to the Arafura Sea — the Fly, Strickland, Kikori and the Trans-Fly. Slow, turbid lowland rivers and seasonal swamps, the range of the Fly River and Kiunga rainbowfishes and the blue-eyes of the Upper Fly.

New Guinea highlands

3 species

New Guinea · the central cordillera

The cool, clear headwater streams and rift lakes high in the central dividing range — Lake Kutubu, Lake Tebera, the upper Purari and Pima. A handful of montane Melanotaenia adapted to colder, faster water than their lowland relatives, several of them single-lake endemics.

Northern Australia

10 species

Australia · the monsoonal north

The monsoon-fed rivers of the tropical north — the Kimberley and Pilbara of Western Australia, the Top End and Arnhem Land, Cape York and the Gulf of Carpentaria drainages. Hardy, wide-ranging splendida-group rainbowfishes and the blackbanded rainbowfish thrive in these seasonally pulsing systems.

Eastern Australia & the Murray–Darling

12 species

Australia · the east and south-east

The coastal rivers of Queensland and New South Wales and the great inland Murray–Darling. The crimsonspotted (Melanotaenia duboulayi), the Murray River rainbowfish (M. fluviatilis), the ornate rainbowfish and the honey blue-eye belong to these temperate-to-subtropical eastern waters.

New Guinea — other drainages

25 species

New Guinea · Indonesia & Papua New Guinea

New Guinea species whose recorded range falls outside, or spans, the named drainages above — including several recently-described forms still known from a single creek. New Guinea is the centre of rainbowfish diversity; its hydrography is intricate and incompletely mapped.

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