Australoheros facetus
species of fish
Australoheros facetus, formerly Cichlasoma facetum, the chameleon cichlid or chanchito, is a species of cichlid from the subfamily Cichlasomatinae which is native to northern Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and southern Brazil.
Description
Australoheros facetus has a high and deeply compressed body which is covered with large scales. It has a small, upward pointing mouth in which the jaws do not reach farther than the forward margin of the eye. It has a long dorsal fin which extends to two thirds of the total length of the fish. The caudal fin has a rounded shape.
It is distinguished from other species in the genus Australoheros by its longer lower jaw, upward pointing mouth and in having the shortest dorsal scale cover and the fewest scales on the dorsal and anal fins. Most specimens, 80% of fish, have four abdominal bars while these are present in only half of the individuals of its congeners. They normally attain 18 centimetres (7.1 in) in length but males have been recorded at 60 centimetres (24 in) The colour varies from brassy yellow through to greenish and even black and it is normally marked with a number of dark transverse bands. The males are larger than the females with larger fins.
Distribution
Australoheros facetus has a native range in the Río de la Plata Basin in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and in the coastal drainages of Uruguay, Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and Buenos Aires in Argentina.
“Australoheros facetus” enters the record as species of fish. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Australoheros, facetus and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 4, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3576. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Australoheros facetus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.