Type locality is given simply as ‘Amazon River, Brazil’, but this species is currently understood to be distributed throughout much of the Amazon, Orinoco and Tocantins river systems with records existing from Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Venezuela.
Populations from Peru, the area around Leticia, Colombia, and the rio Javari basin in Brazil differ in the number of vertebrae and pored lateral line scales compared with those from the lower Amazon and Río Orinoco.
