Aquarist Atlas · the bonytongue fishes

Every bonytongue on one map

688 georeferenced records across 10 species, drawn across four continents — the bonytongues are a scattered, deep-time order. The silver and black arowanas and the arapaima fill the Amazon; the African fauna dominates the map — Heterotis, the butterflyfish, the featherback Xenomystus, the ~230 mormyrids and Gymnarchus across the Congo, the Niger, the Nile and the Zambezi; the clown knife (Chitala) and Notopterus trace the rivers of Southeast Asia; and the Scleropages arowanas reach into Sundaland, Australia and New Guinea. Colour the cloud by group, 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 688 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 (bonytongue genera have shifted: the arowanas moved among Scleropages, Osteoglossum and old names like Delsmania, the arapaima has been split into several species, and many mormyrids travel under a former genus). 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 aquaculture or ornamental-farm record, or a feral occurrence well outside the native range — the farmed arowanas and arapaima are widely traded, so we keep only points that fall inside the native-range boxes. Many little-collected African mormyrids have no public records yet — an empty map is honest, not an error. No coordinates are invented.

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