Iguazu River

The ray-finned fish

Iguazu River, also called Iguazu Catfish, is a ray-finned fish in the family Pimelodidae (order Siluriformes) — Steindachneridion melanodermatum.

Range and habitat

The Iguazu River or Rio Iguassu (Portuguese: Rio Iguaçu. Spanish: Río Iguazú; from Guarani y guasú 'big water'), is a river in Brazil and Argentina. It is an important tributary of the Paraná River. The Iguazu River is 1,320 kilometres (820 mi) long, with a drainage basin of 62,000 km2 (24,000 mi2).

GBIF currently lists 371 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Habits

This also means that, except for the threatened Iguazu River in the lower part, large migratory fish known from much of the Paraná River Basin are naturally absent from Iguazu.

In crisis

Iguazu River 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 Iguazu River, Wikidata item Q27089 and GBIF occurrence geography. 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.