''Pao barbatus'' is a species of freshwater pufferfish found in the

Mekong River The Mekong or Mekong River is a trans-boundary river in East Asia and Southeast Asia. It is the world's twelfth longest river and the third longest in Asia. Its estimated length is , and it drains an area of , discharging of water annuall ...

in southeast Asia.Saenjundaeng, P., Grudpun, C., & Vidthayanon, C. (2013): Validation of Tetraodon barbatus Roberts, 1998, a Freshwater Pufferfish (Family Tetraodontidae) from the Mekong River. ''Tropical Natural History, 13 (2): 77-85''. It is closely related to '' Tetraodon (Pao) cambodgiensis'' and was generally considered a

junior synonym The Botanical and Zoological Codes of nomenclature treat the concept of synonymy differently. * In botanical nomenclature, a synonym is a scientific name that applies to a taxon that (now) goes by a different scientific name. For example, Linna ...

of that species until 2013. In the same year its

species group In biology, a species complex is a group of closely related organisms that are so similar in appearance and other features that the boundaries between them are often unclear. The taxa in the complex may be able to hybridize readily with each oth ...

was moved from the genus ''

Tetraodon ''Tetraodon'' is a genus in the pufferfish family (Tetraodontidae) found in freshwater in Africa. It is the type genus of the family and historically included numerous other species; several Asian species were only moved to the genera ''Dichotomy ...

'' to '' Pao''.Eschmeyer, W. N., R. Fricke, and R. van der Laan (18 February 2017).
Catalog of Fishes.
' Retrieved 18 February 2017.

References

Tetraodontidae Fish described in 1998 Fish of the Mekong Basin {{tetraodontiformes-stub