Taxonomy
The sailfin molly was originally described in 1821 as Mollienesia latipinna by the naturalist Charles Alexandre Lesueur. Lesueur based his description upon specimens from freshwater ponds in the vicinity of New Orleans, Louisiana. However, Lesueur described other collections of the sailfin molly as Mollienesia multilineata in 1821, the same year in which he described M. latipinna. This conflict created confusion and eventually necessitated a ruling by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). In 1959, the ICZN placed precedence on the name Mollienesia latipinna Lesueur 1821. In a landmark definitive work on Poeciliid fishes, Donn Rosen and Reeve Bailey (1959) noted the priority of Poecilia by Marcus Elieser Bloch and Johann Gottlob Schneider (1801) with regards to Mollienesia by Lesueur (1821), thereby relegating Mollienesia to the synonymy of Poecilia.
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