Cardinal Tetra

🌍 Overview

The cardinal tetra is a small schooling fish from the blackwater tributaries of the Amazon and Orinoco basins, closely resembling the neon tetra but with its iridescent red stripe running the full length of the body rather than just the rear half. Enormous numbers are still sustainably wild-harvested from the Rio Negro each year through community-based fisheries, a rare case where the aquarium trade directly funds rainforest conservation by giving local communities an economic reason to keep the forest, and the river, intact.

📋 Quick Facts

📜 History

Its scientific name comes out of one of the odder priority races in ichthyology. In 1956 George Myers and Stanley Weitzman were preparing to describe the fish as Hyphessobrycon cardinalis, but Leonard Schultz published his own description first, in the hobbyist magazine Tropical Fish Hobbyist, and named it Cheirodon axelrodi after the magazine's founder Herbert R. Axelrod. Schultz won on priority, and the species is now Paracheirodon axelrodi. Myers and Weitzman lost the binomial and kept everything else, because their proposed epithet survives, in English, as the common name every shop uses.

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🤩 Fun Facts