Aquarist Atlas · the freshwater stingrays

Every river stingray on one map

766 georeferenced records across 38 species, drawn across the fresh waters of tropical South America — the only continent where stingrays live their whole lives in fresh water. They range from the Orinoco llanos and the rivers of the Guianas, through the vast Amazon and its blackwater tributaries like the Xingu and Tapajós, south to the Paraná–Paraguay, with isolated populations in the Magdalena and Maracaibo basins. Colour the cloud by genus — the wide-ranging Potamotrygon, the disc-shaped Paratrygon, the long-tailed Plesiotrygon and the round Heliotrygon — or switch to compare mode and read two species’ ranges against each other.

© Adobe Stock

About this map. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and click a dot to identify the species. The 766 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 — river-stingray taxonomy is difficult and several species were long confused. Many narrow-range Amazonian rays have few public records — a sparse map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.

← Browse the Stingrays index