Aquarist Atlas · tetras & characins

Every tetra on one map

43,970 georeferenced records across 1,444 species, drawn over the fresh waters of the tetra world — the Amazon and Orinoco basins, the rivers of the Guianas and the Paraná–Paraguay to the south, and the Congo, Niger and the great lakes’ drainages of Africa. Colour the cloud by family — the true tetras (Characidae), the slender Iguanodectidae, the pencilfish (Lebiasinidae), the hatchetfish (Gasteropelecidae) and the African Alestidae — 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 43,970 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 village 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. Many small, recently-described characins have few or no public records yet — an empty map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.

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