Endangered
Flame tetra
Hyphessobrycon flammeus
Flame tetra is a characin in the family Characidae (order Characiformes) — Hyphessobrycon flammeus, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The rear half of the body is flame red while the area in front of the dorsal fin is silver, crossed by two dark vertical bars.
The flame tetra reaches about 2.5 cm (1 in) in standard length.
Range and habitat
The flame tetra is native to Southeast Brazil, where it occurs in coastal parts of Rio de Janeiro (Guanabara bay region, and Paraíba do Sul and Guandu River basins) and São Paulo (upper Tietê River basin). It lives in rivers and streams, generally preferring shallow (less than 0.5 m (1.6 ft) deep), slow-flowing sections with vegetation and a water temperature between 22–28 °C (72–82 °F).
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
Characiforms school or hold small territories in Neotropical rivers. Many named tetras are known from one drainage that can be silted or dammed.
In crisis
This fish was first introduced as an aquarium fish in 1920 by C. Today, it is common in the aquarium trade and large numbers are bred in captivity, but the remaining wild population in Southeast Brazil is highly threatened. The flame tetra has declined drastically, mainly because of habitat loss, pollution and introduced species (especially tilapia and black bass).
Although sometimes reported as extinct in the wild, wild populations have survived, albeit perhaps not everywhere in its range. For example, the last confirmed record from Rio de Janeiro was from 1992. In its small remaining range, the flame tetra is common in the Tietê River basin (that possibly is not natural, but introduced) and rare elsewhere.
Flame tetra is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Flame tetra, Wikidata item Q969545. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
